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A lot of ground is covered in this edition of Seijigiri. We have a new Prime Minister, Naoto Kan, as Yukio Hatoyama has stepped down and taken Ichiro Ozawa with him. How will this affect the DPJ going into next month’s Upper House election?

The role of Futenma in the downfall of Yukio Hatoyama is discussed in the show, as well as some possible new cabinet members.

Another issue is support numbers for all parties, as it seems the voting public is tired of all political parties at this stage in time.

Sports

We don’t normally cover sports (although you can keep up with Japanese baseball at our sister site Tsubamegun), but this was too good to resist: with the World Cup finals in South Africa set to begin this month, Japan’s national team played a friendly against soccer powerhouse England in Graz, Austria, and scored three goals, allowing their heavily favored opponents none.

The only problem? Two of the balls Japan players put in the net were own goals, handing England a 2-1 win and bringing hapless Japan to a record of 3 wins, 4 losses, and 2 draws this year, with the wins coming against Yemen, Hong Kong, and Bahrain - you don’t have to follow soccer any more closely than we do to know that Yemen, Hong Kong, and Bahrain are not exactly contenders.

Oh well, at least Japanese sports fans can gaze off into the distance at March 2013 and a chance for a World Baseball Classic three-peat.

For those interested in the World Cup, in World Cup-related stuff, or in food and drink, be sure to swing by our other sister site, Japan Eats, to catch up on reviews of World Cup-themed sake and more.

Politics

Prime Minister Hatoyama is not getting any more popular. In the most recent Kyodo poll, his Cabinet’s approval rating dropped to 19%, while the disapproval rating leapt nine points to 73%, up from 64% last month. Equally bad for the ruling camp, the same poll showed professed support for the DPJ at 21%, while 22% said the supported the LDP - the first time the LDP has polled ahead fo the DPJ since the DPJ’s resounding victory in last summer’s Lower House elections.

Along with his plummeting popularity, the PM has adopted a new stance twoards the press corps from his LDP predecessors: instead of making eye contact with reporters and chatting with them as he answered questions off the cuff, Hatoyama has taken to staring directly into the cameras, keeping his answers short and scripted, and cutting off Q & A sessions abruptly.

As the Asahi points out, Hatoyama’s approach is not only exactly like that of former PMs Abe and Fukuda, who both took to gazing through the lens, saying they were trying to talk directly to voters, just as Hatoyama has done. Fukuda left office famously snapping, “I’m not like you,” at a reporter who asked a critical question. The next step is thinly-veiled hostility a la Taro Aso, who blamed reporters for his low approval ratings.

Mizuho Fukushima, head of the Social Democratic Party and now-former Consumer Affairs Minister, was kicked out of the Cabinet last week after clashing with the DPJ over PM Hatoyama’s decision to keep USMC Air Station Futenma in Okinawa. Having led her party in a campaign pledge to remove the base from Okinawa altogether, Fukushima removed her party from the ruling coalition on Sunday.

Senior Vice Minister for Land, Infrastructure, Transport, and Tourism Kiyomi Tsujimoto left with Fukushima, thus eliminating all traces of the SDP in the Cabinet.

SDP Deputy Chief Seiji Mataichi described the split as a divorce, saying there were still issues to be resolved between the two parties related to the upcoming Upper House elections. The SDP, though, may have given up its biggest chance at drawing attention by stepping back into the opposition.

On the other hand, losing a coalition partner is almost certainly harmful to the DPJ’s image and the image of the increasingly unpopular Cabinet. The SDP hopes to gain by distancing itself from the DPJ in the long run.

For its part, the DPJ, in the form of Deputy Secretary General Goshi Hosono, defended the PM’s decision, claiming that defiance of the US and further delays in reaching an agreement would have led to delays in the relocation of 8,000 Marines and their families from Okinawa to Guam by 2014.

At about 8:00 a.m. Japan time, Friday morning, Hatoyama spoke to President Obama on the phone. According to Japanese government sources who spoke to the Yomiuri, Obama repeatedly called the PM “Yukio”, praised his efforts on the Okinawa issue, and did his best to charm the PM, perhaps steeling Mr. Hatoyama in his dealings with the SDP.

Later on Friday, the Japanese and American governments delivered a joint statement confirming their mutual intention to move the USMC Air Station Futenma to the Camp Schwab Honokosaki area, in the Henoko district of Nago, on the Northern part of Okiawa island. This is in line with the November 2006 agreement between the US and the government of then-PM Shinzo Abe.

The document, signed by the “two-plus-two” group of the foreign and defense ministers of both countries - Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada, Defense Minister Toshimi Kitazawa, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates - states that both sides will continue to seek opportunites for joint use of facilities and to conduct some exercises in other prefectures or at SDF facilities outside of Okinawa and that both sides will look into opportunities to move some activities outside of Japan in the future. This last point, apparently a nod to the wishes of the SDP, was clearly too little too late for that relationship.

According to the largely reconfirmed 2006 agreement, about 8,000 Marines and a slightly larger number of their dependents will be moved to Guam by 2014, at which time the area south of Kadena Air Base in Okinawa will be returned to Japan.

Following South Korean revelations that, as suspected, a North Korean torpedo was responsible for the March sinking of a South Korean corvette, resulting in 46 casualties, Japan approved further sanctions against the already heavily-sanctioned Hermit Kingdom. Under the new sanctions, any remittance of over ￥3 million will require a detailed report filed with the Japanese government; this is down from the previous limit of ￥10 million. Likewise, any traveler going from Japan to North Korea will have to declare any amount over ￥100,000, down from ￥300,000. North Korean nationals residing in Japan will still be allowed to reenter Japan after visiting the DPRK.

PM Hatoyama has also asked his Government to come up with further sanctions ahead of a UN decision on a resolution condemning North Korea and meetings with China on the issue. The Japanese sanctions are considered to hold mostly symbolic value at this point.

And finally, Ichiro Ozawa.

Last week, prosecutors said they wouldn’t indict the DPJ Secretary General on charges related a political funds scandal that landed his former underling in jail. This after an independent review panel called for a re-investigation of the matter.

A story of a different kind of skullduggery is now unfolding with sources close to the panel leaking that DPJ Deputy Secretary General Megumu Tsuji contacted the chiefs of the review panels and asked them to visit his office, a request they refused. The Yomiuri reports Tsuji’s actions as apparently seeking the indictment of Ozawa, but Tsuji is an Ozawa ally and has issued statements saying that he think sthe lawyer advising the citizen panel might be offering advice favorable of an indictment.

Yeah, we don’t get it yet, either, but we’ll keep you posted.

The review panel is looking at Ozawa’s case again. If they disagree with prosecutors for a third time and again call for Ozawa’s indictment, the indictment will be mandatory. That decision is due this summer.

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First of all, this edition of Seijigiri has been released a few days late due to editing difficulties. Batteries ran out, memory cards filled and mics made strange line noise during recording. So, I decided to release this edition of the show largely unedited. The edits I remember removing are a few coughs, a mic falling over and one loud belch.

This edition of the show begins with a look at Prime Minister Hatoyama’s falling approval ratings (which has become an ongoing theme) and turns to a discussion of the Futenma issue and Hillary Clinton’s (then) upcoming visit to Japan.

After that, discussion turns to the candidacy of Ryoko Tani and we are blessed with a rant from Mr DeOrio.

Politics

With the Upper House elections only two months away, the most recent Jiji poll shows that public approval of Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama’s Cabinet has begun to drop below the 20% mark, the point of sure demise for LDP governments, which means all but one of Hatoyama’s predecessors in the past 55 years. A Yomiuri poll of last weekend presents almost equally dire figures with the Cabinet garnering the approval of just 24% of respondents, a drop of nine points since the previous poll. The Jiji and Yomiuri polls showed disapproval of the Cabinet at 64% and 67%, respectively.

Among the most visible and reported causes of frustration with or disapproval of Hatoyama’s leadership has been his handling of the relocation of US Marine Corps Air Station Futenma in Okinawa, an issue on which 66% of Yomiuri respondents feel the Government’s proposal to move some operations from relatively urban Ginowan on the main island of Okinawa to less-populated Tokunoshima to the North and other operations to a site at Camp Schwab, in Nago, on the Northern part of the main island is not in keeping with the DPJ’s campaign pledge to move the base out of Okinawa if not out of Japan altogether, much less with Hatoyama’s self-imposed deadline of the end of May for reaching an agreement that could be implemented - a deadline the PM now acknowledges he is unlikely to meet.

That poll result echoes the even stronger sentiment against Hatoyama’s plan within Okinawa itself, where a recent Asahi poll shows 76% of residents opposed.The same poll shows a majority, 53%, of Okinawans in favor of moving the base out of Okinawa altogether, a marked increase from the 38% who supported such a move a year ago, and a drop of ten points, from 46% to 36%, of residents against losing the base entirely.

This opposition to the plan accompanies a broader sense of what Okinawans call waji-waji, or frustration, anger, and despair, as explained by the Asahi, with not only the US and Japanese governments, but mainland Japan, which, Okinawans feel, has ignored its poorest prefecture and the sacrifices it has borne carrying the weight of the US-Japan security arrangement both before and after its transfer from American to Japanese sovereignty 38 years ago this month.

Polls aside, the Yomiuri reports that an independent count of aerial photographs of a recent anti-base protest in Okinawa show once again that the organizers of such events do more than a little exaggerating when reporting turnout. This time, the discrepancy is between the 90,000 reported by the organizers and the 11,569 counted in the photos. The security firm in question admits it could not count people under trees or inside tents or other structures, but it is safe to assume there were not over 78,000 such people at the venue, which has a capacity of 50,000.

Adding to the PM’s headaches over the base issue is continued pressure from the United States to adhere to the late 2006 agreement reached between the US and the Government of then-PM Shinzo Abe. The USMC has already nixed the Tokunoshima plan, or at least greatly delayed it, saying that the existing runway and landing strip on the island are of inadequate size. The US also opposes Hatoyama’s proposal to build the agreed-upon runway at Camp Scwab on pilings, as opposed to on landfill, for fear of making it vulnerable to terrorist attack from underneath. The Japanese Government had hoped to use pilings in an attempt to assuage opposition to the plan based on environmental concerns.

The Futenma issue, and others, will be discussed by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada during Clinton’s visit to Japan next week. The US is also reportedly concerned over the increasing likelihood of a North Korean torpedo being behind the explosion that sank a South Korean naval ship in the Yellow Sea in March, killing dozens of South Korean sailors. The South Korean government is expected to announce the conclusions of its investigation on May 20th.

The visit, which will begin on May 21st, will be Secretary Clinton’s second, the first having been in February 2009, shortly after US President Barack Obama’s inauguration and Clinton’s appointment to her post.

As the July 11th Upper House election draws nearer, the DPJ is banking on the reflected light of stars to improve its fortunes. Secretary General Ichiro Ozawa has recruited Olympic judo gold medalist Ryoko Tani to run on the proportional representation list in July. While Tani has resigned her nominal post at Toyota, which sponsored her, she says she plans to “envelop” the world with love and continue working hard to win another judo gold at the 2012 Summer Games. The DPJ has also succeeded in signing up former model and TV “talent” Mari Okabe, and gymnast Yukio Iketani for runs in PR, and cyclist Tomohiro Nagatsuka in Ibaraki. Ozawa has been fairly open about the party’s hopes that name recognition will be enough to draw votes.

The DPJ is not alone, though. The LDP, having long been the establishment, went with the athletic establishment and mined the Yomiuri Giants baseball club for popular former manager Tsuneo Horiuchi and Hiroo Ishii (who also played for the Kintetsu Buffaloes, since merged to form the Orix Buffaloes.) Yomiuri also provided Kiyoshi Nakahata to the splinter Sunrise Party, recently formed from LDP dissenters on the conservative side, who also signed up the much-maligned Taizo Sugimura, best remembered for getting into office through PR in the unexpectedly big LDP victory of September 2005, bragging about how he’d spend his generous DIet member’s salary, publicly cheating on his fiancee, proposing a bridge to Russia, and running a foolhardy campaign against a popular incumbent before having support withdrawn by the LDP.

Celebrities on the party list or not, Ichiro Ozawa still has much to worry about. After a citizens’ panel decided, on April 27th, to ask prosecutors to reopen an investigation into accusations that Rikuzankai, Ozawa’s political fund management organization falsely reported use of funds and bought expensive real estate in Tokyo using donations from construction companies that had business with the government in Ozawa’s home district of Iwate, Ozawa was questioned for the third time this weekend. If prosecutors again decide not to indict Ozawa, the independent judicial panel can review the case again and insist on an indictment.

For his part, Ozawa insists that he was unaware of the activities of his secretaries, who handled the fund’s money, and expressed eagerness over facing the Lower House’s Deliberative Council on Political Ethics to answer questions and clear his name.

The Council and its Upper House counterpart were created in 1985 in response to the involvement of former PM Kakuei Tanaka, Ozawa’s political mentor, in the Lockheed bribery scandal. Ozawa was chairman of the Lower House’s Committee on Rules and Administration at the time. He is only the tenth Diet member to come before the council he tells others politicians he created. Perhaps the most severe punishment the Council can administer is barring a Diet member it finds guilty of ethical failings from entering the Diet building.

Also on the opposition side, senior Upper House LDP member Mikio Aoki, who served as Chief Cabinet Secretary under Prime Ministers Keizo Obuchi and Yoshiro Mori and as acting Prime Minister during Obuchi’s hospitalization just prior to his death, has decided not to run for reelection from his Shimane district. The 75-year-old, who was recently hospitalized following a mild stroke, was a heavyweight in the LDP faction led by former PM Ryutaro Hashimoto in the 1990s and enforced the faction’s positions in the Upper House.

Finally in politics, the Happiness Realization Party has gotten a seat. The political arm of the religious group Happy Science, which many observers consider to be the cult of the eccentric Ryuho Okawa, fared badly in last summer’s Lower House elections, coming in at or near the bottom of every race in which it entered a candidate. Mainstream political commentators laughed.

Too soon, though. Yasuhiro Oe, who has been a member of the LDP, the DPJ, and, most recently, the Japan Renaissance Party, with which he won an Upper House seat, has switched his party affiliation to the HRP after realizing that Okawa had strong beliefs.

So, yes, that means the HRP has a seat in the Diet.

Society

The elderly are getting more lonely. The 2010 white paper on aging, released Friday, cited a 2008 Cabinet Office survey, which showed that 4.65 million people aged 65 or over are living alone and that, of those, 35% have contact with other people, in any form, only once every few days or less, breaking down into 41.2% of men and 32.4% of women.

The white paper says that such social isolation was a major factor in the three-fold increase in the number of crimes committed by the elderly, two-thirds of which were shoplifting or other forms of theft, over the past decade.

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As April comes to a close, it’s time for another edition of Seijigiri. This week, co-hosts Garrett DeOrio and Ken Worsley start by talking about Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama’s approval ratings, which had dropped to about 24% at the time of recording (and have since fallen to 20% in one poll). The disappearance of his wife Miyuki from the public eye is discussed and the role of Ichiro Ozawa once again rears its head.

Talk then swings back to Futenma, as Hatoyama has staked his job on finding a solution to the base issue by his self-appointed deadline at the end of May. Finally, our co-hosts discuss yet another vanity party emerging from the ashes of the LDP, as former Health, Welfare and Labor Minister Yoichi Masuzoe has founded the Shinto Kaikaku. Will he be looking to join forces with other newly established parties such as Yoshimi Watanabe’s Your Party (Minna no To) and the Sunrise Party of Japan (Tachiagare Nippon) headed by Takeo Hiranuma and Kaoru Yosano?

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Welcome back, Seijigiri listeners! In this edition of the show, co-hosts Garrett DeOrio and Ken Worsley begin by taking a look at the LDP’s campaign manifesto, which was recently leaked to Kyodo. That leads to a discussion of the upcoming Upper House election, the challenges facing Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, the Futenma issue and the perception that cracks are forming in the US-Japan alliance.

Talk then turns to the formation of the Tachiagare Nippon party, which translates as “Stand Up, Japan” and is being called the “Sunrise Party” in English language media. The final issue discussed is the inability of the DPJ cabinet to get through a bill allowing married couples to keep separate family names after marriage.

This edition of Seijigiri begins with a look at a recent Washington Post article entitled “A leading Japanese politician espouses a 9/11 fantasy.” This bizarre unsigned editorial has been dragged over the coals by many bloggers, and co-hosts Garrett DeOrio and Ken Worsley offer their thoughts on the piece.

Also brought into question is a recent Japan Times editorial entitled “Yet another ‘Battle of Okinawa’.” In that editorial the author writes, “[The Guam Treaty] was unconstitutional since under Article 95 of the Japanese Constitution any law applicable only to one local public entity requires the consent of the majority of the voters of that district and the Okinawan wishes were clearly ignored in the Guam Treaty.”

We checked the Japanese Constitution and it does indeed say, “A special law, applicable only to one local public entity, cannot be enacted by the Diet without the consent of the majority of the voters of the local public entity concerned, obtained in accordance with law.” However, it says nothing about treaties or construction projects, which the Guam Treaty essentially amounts to.

The show winds up with a discussion of ongoing funding scandals at the DPJ and a quick turn back to the Washington Post editorial.

In this edition of Seijigiri, co-hosts Garrett DeOrio and Ken Worsley take a look at the 2010 budget, which was recently passed by the lower house and is thus guaranteed to become the official budget.

From there, the show moves on to examine the ongoing campaign finance scandals that threaten to undermine DPJ leadership. This leads to a discussion of Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama’s plummeting approval ratings and his soaring disapproval ratings.

Up next is a quick look at the LDP and what they are doing as an opposition party amidst calls for their leader to resign. Will the LDP itself survive as a party?

The show ends with short discussions on the decision to shelve the bill the would allow permanent residents the right to vote in local elections and the recently proposed idea that troubles at Toyota would undermine Japan’s soft power influence.

Futenma and whaling, unfortunately, will have to wait until next time.

It’s good to be back. Thanks to everyone who kept in touch during Seijigiri’s absence from the airwaves, or the series of tubes, or whatever it is.

In this edition of what remains perhaps Japan’s only political podcast, your hosts Ken Worsley and Garrett DeOrio take a look at what’s in store for the DPJ in its first regular Diet session. The statute of limitations for murder looks like it may be on its way out, sufferage for Special Permanent Residents is on the horizon again (but Shizuka Kamei doesn’t like it), and the fate of the relocation plan for USMC Air Station Futenma remains in question, especially as the election of new Nago Mayor Inamine would seem to uphold the views of those Okinawans who’d rather not have the Marines in their neighborhood.

All of this, though, is happening under the shadow of the scandals surrounding political fund donations to Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama and shday land purchases by the political fund of DPJ Secretary General Ichiro Ozawa.

Exciting times have returned.

Be sure to spend election night with TPR. Adam Richards and Chris Gunson will be joining the Seijigiri guys on the evening (and late into the night) of Sunday, August 30th to announce, analyze, discuss, and otherwise have fun with the election results as they come in. Yes, as they come in. It’s a live video broadcast of Seijigiri.

In the current podcast:
Your hosts Ken Worsley and Garrett DeOrio return to disucss their favorite topic: elections. With a general election, and a real chance of someone other than the LDP really running the government for the first time since 1955, coming up on August 30th, there’s a lot to talk about.

Will the opposition DPJ win a majority? If so, how big might that majority be? (The numbers keep going up. While Garrett and Ken discuss the projections published by the Yomiuri Shimbun and Observing Japan, just after this was recorded, the Mainichi Shimbun blew Seijigiri’s collective mind by speculating that the DPJ might win as many as 320 of the 480 seats.)

How are the seats apportioned? What’s the difference between a single-seat district and proportional representation? How are lawmakers like the DPJ’s Akira Nagatsuma able to stay in the Diet even after they lose their races?

Perhaps most important of all, what’s going to happen if and when the DPJ wins? What pressures will they face? What will happen to the LDP?

All these questions and more are answered in this edition of Seijigiri.

Thanks for listening.