The real problem with Asō's gaffe

After the uprising of the 17th of June
The Secretary of the Writers' Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts.
Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

Bertolt Brecht, "Die Lösung" (1953)

Deputy Prime Minister/Finance Minister Asō Tarō kicked off the second leg of the second Abe government with a fine contribution to the hall of fame of gaffes committed by Japanese politicians.

Speaking at a symposium hosted by the right-wing Japan Institute for National Fundamentals, Asō spoke about how the Abe government should approach constitution revision. He said:

Now if you say "let’s do it quietly," you need to look back at the Weimar Constitution, whose amendment went unnoticed. It was changed before most people realized it had happened. We need to learn from this. I have absolutely no intention of rejecting democracy. But I don’t want to see us make these decisions in the midst of an uproar. 

(That's from a translation by Peter Durfee; the full text of his remarks can be found here.)

The resulting international uproar — usually presented under headlines like "Japanese Finance Minister Taro Aso comes under fire for Nazi remarks" — has resulted in Asō's coming under pressure to resign from opposition parties, and under pressure from the prime minister (jp) to retract his remarks. He has retracted, but has said he will not resign.

However, in my reading of his remarks, Asō's interpretation of how the Weimar constitution was revised may have been the least offensive aspect of his speech. What's offensive about Asō's speech is the arrogant disdain for the messy reality of democracy, the lament of every would-be utopian in history eager to ram the square peg of humanity into their round hole of choice. Asō repeatedly bemoans the "boisterousness," "tumultuousness,"and "uproariousness" present in public discussion of constitution revision. He seems to say, Why can't the people see that we know what's best for them? Can't they see that the facts demand revision? I read this less as a blueprint for revision than as a whine about how it's all the fault of the public and the mass media for how little success Japan's revisionist right has had when it comes to building a consensus in favor of their vision of the constitution.

Why shouldn't the debate be boisterous? Why shouldn't there be uproarious and fierce opposition when the debate is about the document that serves as the nation's moral center — especially when the LDP's draft makes no secret of its plans to change the values enshrined in the constitution?  Why shouldn't Japanese defenders of the constitution feel just as strongly about defending a document — a document that, whatever its origins, has become an important pillar of postwar Japanese society — as the revisionists feel about changing it? Who are Abe, Asō, and company to decide whether a debate is being conducted appropriately or not?

At its best, liberal democracy is "boisterous" and "uproarious," because if the people have the freedom to speak their minds, there is bound to be a tumult. Politicians seeking order, politeness, and decorum can find some fine examples in Japan's immediate neighborhood.

In the final analysis, I don't think Asō was longing for an end to democracy or outlining a secret plan for constitutional revision. Rather, he has once again revealed a fundamental fact about his and Abe's worldview: they have no problem stating their love for democracy as an abstract idea, a value to be promoted in East Asia and a rhetorical cudgel with which to bludgeon China, but they have little love for democracy as it is actually practiced in Japan.

The LDP has an election date

Aso Taro has resigned his post as party president and the LDP has scheduled its party leadership for four weeks from today, 28 September. The campaign for the party presidency will officially begin ten days earlier, on 18 September, giving the candidates just over two weeks to make their intentions known and then begin traveling the country to make their appeals to the party's chapters.

Safe to say, the race is wide open. Given that Masuzoe Yoichi is just about the most popular politician in Japan and the only LDP politician candidates wanted to be seen with, he probably has the upper hand in the race for the 141 votes wielded by the LDP's prefectural chapters — if he decides to run. His position may be weaker, however, among the party's Diet members, who now number 202 betweens the two houses. The list of names in the LDP field could be lengthy, and the race chaotic. Masuzoe has said that he is a blank slate as to whether to run, and in the meantime plans to focus on his work as a cabinet minister. Tanigaki Sadakazu might run once again.

Given that the race won't officially begin until 18 September, it is likely that the party will be choosing its leader after Hatoyama Yukio is officially elected as prime minister, which will presumably occur a few days earlier.

The path to a New Liberal Democratic Party

Fresh after barely escaping with his political life, Nakagawa Hidenao — who you will recall failed to unseat Aso Taro as LDP leader in July and then stressed that the DPJ would destroy Japan and had to be stopped — has announced that he wants to stand in the election to succeed Aso as LDP leader.

Nakagawa is nothing if not pugnacious, which might be a good quality to have as leader of the opposition, but by the same token his pugnaciousness has not endeared him to other members of the LDP. And it is unclear whether there are enough members of his so-called "Rising Tide" school to propel him onward to victory, let alone in the party's prefectural chapters. But given the disarray within the LDP, he should have plenty of time to campaign around the country in the hope that he can win on the back of support from the party's grassroots.

Presumably the field will also include Ishiba Shigeru — Ishiba has in fact already indicated that he will run — and Ishihara Nobuteru, both candidates from last year, and possibly upper house member Masuzoe Yoichi. And I expect the field to get even more crowded before too long.

Either of the latter might be better at uniting a broken party, because that, after all, is the primary task facing the party's next leader. I don't just mean broken from the election, but broken at its very core, divided among ideological camps, factions, and policy tribes. The new leader will have to reforge the LDP as a top-down, centralized party. He (or she?) will have to remake the party's institutions, perhaps copying the DPJ by turning the general council into a Next Cabinet, converting the policy research council into a party think tank that depends more on ties to academics and researchers outside government than the bureaucrats upon which the PRC has long depended, and perhaps setting up a troika-style system of collective leadership that will enable to party leadership to push back against backbenchers — no matter how senior — inclined to disregard the party. In the process, the LDP, very much like the DPJ during the early part of this decade, will have to navigate between the options of unflinching resistance to the governing DPJ and "constructive" opposition to the government. How long before commentators begin discussing how the LDP is nothing but an internally divided, pale imitation of the governing DPJ? But such is the nature of two-large-party systems in modern democracies, especially in Europe, although if Nakagawa wins the party leadership the LDP's opposition to the DPJ might be a bit more foam-flecked, like the US Republican Party's opposition to the Obama administration.

The LDP clearly has a path back to power, sooner or later. The faster it gets on with the process of becoming a new model party, the shorter that road will be. I, for one, do not expect the road to be short.

The Japanese people choose

It is election day in Japan. After forty days of intense campaigning, the sound trucks are silent as the LDP, the DPJ, and a handful of smaller parties submit themselves to the judgment of the voters. After nearly four years, the Japanese people will vote for a new House of Representatives.

I had many ideas for how to write this post, but the answer appear to me when I entered the title. You see, the last post I wrote that began with the words "The Japanese people" was this post, "The Japanese people lose hope." That post, written in March when Ozawa Ichiro, then DPJ leader, was under siege due to the arrest of his aide due to alleged campaign finance violations, dissected a public opinion poll that showed just how disillusioned the Japanese people had become with their political system.

Five months later, things look a bit different.

I do not doubt that the Japanese people are still skeptical of the ability of the political system to deliver the results respondents said they wanted in the poll conducted by Asahi in March. But faced with a choice today, it seems that the voting public is prepared to choose hope not long after the public appeared to have lost hope in the possibility of improving society through politics. The crowds I saw gathered at Ikebukuro on Saturday night were not cynical or apathetic: cynics would have stayed home.

Today the Japanese voter faces a simple choice. On the one side is the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), the long-governing, ever familiar LDP, for better or for worse an institution of Japanese life. It is a party that has spent the past forty days making few arguments for why it deserves a new mandate and many arguments for why the opposition cannot be trusted with power, even as the LDP spent the past four years doing little with the historic mandate it received in 2005. To the very last, the LDP has used its status as Japan's perpetual governing party to argue that only it can be trusted to defend the Japanese people, campaigning on the basis of fear of the unknown. Speaking in Yokohama Saturday, for example, Prime Minister Aso Taro said that thanks to the DPJ's "UN-centered" foreign policy approach, the government's bill authorizing maritime ship inspections was dropped, about which "North Korea was the most pleased." The LDP was making the same argument before the 2007 House of Councillors election.

On the other side is the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), the decade-old leading opposition party that is now poised to take power for the first time. For the past forty days the DPJ has been relentlessly positive. Its leaders and candidates have refused to respond to the LDP's negative campaigning with a negative campaign of its own. Instead the party has campaigned on the basis of its manifesto. It has presented the DPJ as a brand with a common message from Hokkaido to Okinawa. The DPJ made sure that it put its manifesto into the hand of as many voters as possible, even as the LDP's gathered dust in campaign offices. One can question whether the DPJ will be able to follow through on its manifesto — indeed, should the DPJ win, it will sooner or later have to choose which portions of the manifesto to drop due to not having the money to pay for them. But the point is that the party takes its own manifesto seriously.

That does not necessarily mean that the Japanese public will be voting for the DPJ on the basis of the contents of its manifesto: as I noted at the start of the campaign twelve days ago, the same portion of the public doubts that the DPJ will be able to fund its manifesto as doubts that the LDP will be able to deliver on its promises. Instead, if the public chooses the DPJ today, it will be for two simple reasons, Seiken kotai (regime change) and Seikatsu dai-ichi (livelihoods first). The first signifies, of course, a change of ruling party, but no one should think that regime change begins and ends with today's general election. What the DPJ means by regime change is a set of changes to Japan's system of government, starting with placing the power to formulate budgets in the hands of the public's representatives in cabinet. At the same time, the DPJ promises to address the profound economic insecurity that has grown over the past two decades, the sense that life in Japan has gotten unmistakably worse since the end of the bubble economy — and the sense that even as life got worse, the LDP-led government did nothing to reverse the decline.

The DPJ may not be able to deliver on either part. It could fail. But failure is not preordained. And the fact that Japanese people finally appear ready to vote for a new ruling party suggests that the voters are not so cynical as to believe that meaningful political change is impossible. They may be skeptical, but, after all, skepticism is appropriate when a people to view their government.

If I have been criticized for one thing in the nearly three years that I have been writing this blog, it is for being overly partial to the DPJ. That may be the case, but if so, it is for a simple reason: when given a choice between the LDP and DPJ, there is no choice. The LDP is utterly bankrupt as a ruling party. It has indeed failed to address the most basic concerns of the Japanese people. A vote for the LDP is a vote for more fear-mongering and more cynicism, and an LDP victory would be a victory for the idea that Japan is in inevitable decline, that when given a real choice the Japanese people still could not detach themselves from the LDP.

A vote for the DPJ, meanwhile, does not necessarily signify an absolute vote of confidence in the ability of the DPJ to deliver on its plans, but it does suggest a belief in the possibility of a new direction for Japan.

It is common in Japanese politics for leaders to appeal to the Meiji Restoration, when Japanese elites decided to build a modern state. Hatoyama did just that on Saturday evening in a press conference following his rally. But this is not like the Meiji Restoration. This is the Japanese people choosing a new course, one that could result in the people being able to hold their leaders accountable more than at any time in the past.

The last night of LDP rule?

This evening I ventured over to Ikebukuro, where Prime Minister Aso Taro and DPJ leader Hatoyama Yukio were having dueling rallies on opposite sides of Ikebukuro station.

I did not stay long at the LDP rally. Located on the east side of the station, the crowd was gathered on sidewalks around the roundabout, and there was barely enough room to move, let alone listen to the speeches comfortably. What I did notice was that the crowd was silent, almost eerily silent. The politicians introducing Aso, who had not yet appeared when I was there, were certainly trying to stir the crowd, but there was not the slightest bit of applause when one would have expected it.


Not surprisingly, given the emphasis that Aso has placed on defending the flag during the the campaign, the LDP adopted the "put out more flags" approach Saturday evening — spectators may not have been applauding, but they did wave their flags occasionally.

The scene was different on the west side of the station, where Hatoyama addressed a crowd gathered in the park near the west exit.


It's hard to say which side had more people, although it's safe to say that the crowd for Hatoyama was at least as big as the crowd for Aso. And it was certainly engaged.


I did find it interesting that Hatoyama singled out the LDP's negative campaigning in his speech, which otherwise was his standard speech based on the contents of the DPJ's manifesto (which had, of course, been distributed to those in attendance).

Aso naturally stressed the themes that he has stressed throughout the campaign: the ability of the LDP to defend Japan from enemies abroad and economic stagnation at home.

This was the last gasp of an LDP prime minister before submitting himself to the judgment of a public that, if the polls are to be believed, have tired of his party after decades of nearly uninterrupted rule. Asahi reports that roughly 10.9 million people voted early this year, roughly 10% of the electorate and a 63% increase over 2005. It is difficult to see how that is an encouraging sign for the LDP. Yomiuri's last poll found the DPJ's commanding lead unchanged, its figures nearly double the LDP's in most categories. Aso, optimistic to the last, is convinced that the race will be decided in the last two percent, that a come-from-behind victory for the LDP is possible because, he claimed, the parties are running neck and neck in many districts. I would imagine that other LDP leaders, many of them fighting for their political lives, would not agree with Aso's assessment.

The long campaign is finally at an end.

The LDP on the brink of disaster

The general election campaign is heading into its final days. Despite another two days of campaigning, the LDP and DPJ are mostly battling for seats on the margins — the LDP to keep from falling below 100 seats, the DPJ to reach the magic number of 320, the number required for a supermajority. As the campaign has developed, the LDP's position has only slipped, both in polls and other measurements, such as weakening support from the organizations that have long been part of the LDP's vote-gathering machine. The latest slippage is from the Japanese Medical Association, which does not approve of everything in the DPJ's manifesto but expressed its support for several of the party's proposals, concluding that "the DPJ wrote too much in its manifesto, the LDP wrote too little." There seems to be little doubt which direction the JMA would prefer the parties to err.

After all, the latest round of polls making predictions for seat distributions matched the first round of polls, which astoundingly suggested that the DPJ could win around 300 seats. Asahi's latest poll suggests the possibility of 321 seats for the DPJ and 103 for the LDP. I still suspect something closer to 300, plus or minus twenty seats. But it will be a major victory for the DPJ regardless. (Asahi reports that the DPJ might not have named enough candidates to its PR list in the Kinki and Kyushu blocks, where all but two candidates are running simultaneously as SMD and PR candidates.) Similarly, Mainichi's final poll before the election records the DPJ doubling the LDP in nearly every category: party support, voting intentions in single-member districts, PR voting, although Mainichi notes that it is difficult to project how these figures — different from the party's survey of electoral districts that produced the 320 seat prediction recently — will play out in SMDs.

But unless we're about to witness what would surely be the greatest polling error in a developed democracy, the LDP is less than three days away from suffering a crushing, perhaps even mortal blow in this year's general election.

Not surprisingly the closer the LDP gets the defeat, the more desperate and bizarre the pronouncements of the party's leaders. MTC has already noted Yosano Kaoru's absurd warning of the dangers of one party dictatorship, which probably wins as the single worst justification for LDP rule made during the campaign.

But the remarkable thing about the past month of campaigning is that the LDP is no closer to offering a clear reason why it deserves another mandate than it was when Prime Minister Aso Taro dissolved the Diet last month. The one consistent strain in the party's message has been fear. While the LDP has tried to paint a "positive" message of itself as the "conservative party" — the party which protects that which should be protected (begging the obvious response of "The LDP: the party that will protect everything except your pension") — it has spent more time talking about how the DPJ will, through its flip-flopping and its blurring, make things worse.



And so in Osaka Thursday Aso wheeled out the punning critique he made of the DPJ back in June, although this time he removed the qualifier and said "if there is regime change, there will be a recession." (In Japanese the words for regime change and recession are homophones.) And not only will a DPJ government prompt a recession, but its advent will also be accompanied by "chaos." Aso has apparently also stopped apologizing for his party's poor performance, although it's probably just as well — why would anyone vote for a party whose leader opens by apologizing for the party's performance in office and then proceeds to ask for a new mandate?

Not surprisingly given his engrained optimism, Aso continues to throw all of his energy into the campaign, even as those around him in the party leadership freely admit the difficulties facing the LDP. After all, it won't be their names in the history books associated with the defeat that finally broke LDP rule. But even Aso's resolve may be cracking. In response to a query regarding the fading prospects of meeting the goal of retaining a majority between the LDP and Komeito, he could do nothing more than lamely stress that "compared with before, there are more young people (at campaign speeches), and the response isn't bad." He even paused to diagnose the LDP-Komeito coalition's problems, chalking it up the government parties' failure to "clearly state the appeal held by conservatism" before returning to the party's emphasis on defending that which should be defended. (Funny, I thought a major contributing factor to the LDP's decline since Koizumi Junichiro was Abe Shinzo's desire to explain the appeal of conservatism to the public when all they wanted to hear was that their pension records were safe.)

The question now is what happens to the LDP in the aftermath of the coming disaster. Echoing a point I made in this post, a Shukan Bunshun article suggests that the LDP's factions may be the feature of the LDP to go in the wake of the election, with next month's party presidential election being a truly post-factional contest. With five of eight factions potentially headless, the stage may be set for the factions to break and reorganize into two or three distinct ideological groups, the two most prominent being an "Abe faction" and a "Nakagawa [Hidenao] faction." (As both Abe and Nakagawa are currently in the Machimura faction, naturally the ideological split would begin, as I've argued before, in the Machimura faction, the faction that has controlled the LDP for the past decade.) At the same time, there is still a push to make Masuzoe Yoichi, the minister of health, labor, and welfare and the most popular politician in Japan (and the LDP politician I've seen on "two-shot" posters), Aso's successor. Yamasaki Taku, one of the embattled faction heads, said Tuesday that Masuzoe is the strongest candidate to rebuild the LDP. Of course, it is telling that Yamasaki spoke in favor of Masuzoe seeing as how Yamasaki, one of a handful of LDP liberals, would fit comfortably neither in the Nakagawa group nor the Abe group — not unlike Masuzoe, who is in the upper house, does not belong to a faction, and is relentlessly independent in his thinking. Masuzoe would indeed make a good leader, although I'm not sure why as bright as Masuzoe would want to take on the herculean task of cleaning up the LDP after this election. And I wonder how Masuzoe would fare in an election campaign split along the aforementioned ideological lines.

Ultimately it is difficult to say anything for certain until the votes are counted, until we know which ideological camp lost more seats in the general election.

But it is no longer in doubt that the LDP is about to suffer mightily at the hands of the Japanese people.

Kyushu, a conservative bastion

This is the eleventh and final installment in my general election guide. For an explanation of my purpose in making this guide, see here. For previous installments, see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

The Kyushu regional block contains thirty-eight single-member districts spread over eight prefectures: Fukuoka, Saga, Nagasaki, Kumamoto, Oita, Miyazaki, Kagoshima, and Okinawa. The block elects an additional twenty-one representatives through proportional representation, for a total of fifty-nine seats.

The region's major population center is Fukuoka, which constitutes roughly a third of the region's population, with the rest of the region's prefectures being roughly equal in population. The region's economic profile is mixed, including agricultural production suiting that region's sub-tropical climate and heavy industry in northern Kyushu. It was once a major mining center, home to Aso Mining, the family business of Prime Minister Aso Taro.

Along with Shikoku and Chugoku it has been a historically important electoral base for the LDP.

In 2005, opposition parties won seven SMDs, four of those being won by DPJ candidates. Meanwhile the LDP won twenty-five seats and Komeito won six. In PR voting, the LDP won nine, the DPJ seven, Komeito three, and the SDPJ and JCP one each. In 2003, the LDP won twenty-six seats, Komeito one, and the opposition parties eleven, with the DPJ winning eight.

However, opposition parties in five of the region's single-member upper house districts in 2007, suggesting the possibility of DPJ gains in the region.

Fukuoka

In Fukuoka in 2005, the LDP won nine seats and Komeito and the DPJ one each.

The DPJ's Matsumoto Ryu (first district) should easily win the district in which he has won every election since the first election under the new system in 1996.

Meanwhile LDP candidates are likely safe in two districts: Aso Taro (eighth district) and Takeda Ryota (eleventh district). Given that Aso is acting as if his seat is vulnerable — he is declined to run simultaneously as a PR candidate — perhaps I should not list his seat as safe, but I think that Aso will not join John Howard as a leader who loses his government and his constituency in the same election. DPJ candidate Yamamoto Gosei may put pressure on the prime minister — he'll be helped by the absence of a JCP candidate — but I expect Aso will win. If he doesn't, perhaps these predictions are the lower bound for the DPJ's performance on 30 August.

Takeda, who after three attempts finally won a seat in 2003 as a conservative independent who joined the LDP in 2004 only to leave it in 2005 as a postal rebel and win the district as an independent once more, will run as the LDP's candidate this year. He faces the SDPJ's Yamaguchi Haruna and JCP candidate Yamashita Tomiko. The fight will be over the 78,000 votes received by Yamamoto Kozo, the LDP candidate in 2005. Takeda will likely win.

But otherwise LDP candidates across Fukuoka are vulnerable. In the second district, Yamasaki Taku, an LDP faction leader, has profited from divided fields in 2003 and 2005 to win reelection. In 2000, the last time the field included only a DPJ candidate and a JCP candidate (as it does this year) Yamasaki lost by 10,000 votes. Yamasaki is high on the list of LDP heavyweights likely to go down to defeat, bested by DPJ newcomer Inatomi Shuji.

Ota Seiichi in the third district may be even more vulnerable than Yamasaki: in 2005 Ota defeated Fujita Kazue, this year's DPJ candidate and winner of the district in 2003. Fujita will likely win again.

In the fourth district the DPJ may benefit from the absence of a JCP candidate, as JCP candidates received around 15,000 votes in the past several elections, turning what would have been close races into comfortable victories for LDP incumbent Watanabe Tomoyoshi. This time DPJ candidate Koga Takaaki has the field to himself, and could emerge as the winner as a result.

Similarly, in the fifth district DPJ candidate Kusuda Daizo will try for the third time to unseat LDP incumbent Harada Yoshiaki. Harada won by 35,000 votes in 2005, 25,000 in 2003, when Kusuda won a PR seat. But in 2003 Harada shared the field with candidates from the JCP and the SDPJ, who combined for 30,000 votes, enough to swing the election to Harada. This time Harada won't have help from other opposition parties.

Also vulnerable is Hatoyama Kunio, DPJ leader Yukio's brother, who parachuted into the sixth district in 2005 and defeated DPJ incumbent Koga Issei. Koga lost by 22,000 votes and won a PR seat, with a JCP candidate taking 11,000 votes. The absence of a JCP candidate should help Koga, but for his part he is publicly skeptical of his chances, citing the press Hatoyama received due to his departure from the Aso cabinet. Hatoyama may hold on to win.

A third LDP faction leader — besides Yamasaki and Aso — is up for reelection in Fukuoka, Koga Makoto in the seventh district. Like Aso, Koga has declined to run simultaneously as an SMD and PR candidate. Koga faces the DPJ's Noda Kuniyoshi, who previously served as mayor of Yameshi city — and no other candidates. The JCP, for example, took nearly 20,000 votes in 2005, which made little difference in 2005 but could be decisive this year, especially since Koga's vote total has fallen gradually since 2000. Like Yamasaki, I think Koga will lose.

The DPJ may have an even easier time in the ninth district, which until 2005 had been represented by Kitahashi Kenji, first elected in 1996 as an NFP candidate and reelected in 2000 and 2003 as a DPJ candidate. He lost by 15,000 votes in 2005 and won a PR seat, but resigned to run for and win the mayoralty of Kita Kyushu city. In his place the DPJ is running Ogata Rintaro, a former foreign ministry official. Given the DPJ's history in the district, I suspect Ogata will win against LDP incumbent Mihara Asahiko.

Finally, in the tenth district LDP incumbent Nishikawa Kyoko faces the DPJ's Kii Takashi, who first ran in 2003 and finished 12,000 votes behind the LDP's Jimi Shozaburo. Jimi left the party as a postal rebel in 2005 and finished second behind Nishikawa with 65,000 votes, 5,000 votes ahead of Kii. The JCP is running a candidate again, but the SDPJ, which received 10,000 votes in 2005, is not. If Kii can take the bulk of the votes received by Jimi in 2005, he should win the seat.

The DPJ should do very well in Fukuoka, winning at least eight of eleven seats.

Saga

In 2005, postal rebels won two of three seats, with the LDP winning the third. As the postal rebels have returned to the LDP, the LDP is defending all three seats in the prefecture.

In the first district, DPJ candidate Haraguchi Kazuhiro has run in each of the four elections since 1996, winning in 1996 as an NFP candidate and 2003 as a DPJ candidate, and losing in 2000 and 2005 as a DPJ candidate but returning as a PR representative. In this race he faces Fukuoka Takamoro, the victorious LDP candidate from 2005 who Haraguchi defeated in 2003. Haraguchi should return as the SMD representative.

In the second district, 2005 postal rebel Imamura Masahiro returns as the LDP candidate facing Oogushi Hiroshi, the DPJ candidate from 2005 who lost by 15,000 votes and won a PR seat. The question in the second district is what will happen to the 35,000 voters who supported LDP candidate Dokai Chiaki in 2005: do they vote for the party or for the policy line, and if so, which policy line? Imamura could hold on to his seat.

The third district features, in addition to the LDP's Hori Kosuke — another postal rebel — and the DPJ-backed SDPJ candidate Yanase Eiji, candidates from the JCP and Watanabe's YP. Hori should retain the seat.

The DPJ will win at least one of three seats in Saga.

Nagasaki

In Nagasaki's four districts in 2005, the LDP won three and the DPJ one.

The DPJ Takaki Yoshiaki (first district), who has represented the district since 2000, should win reelection comfortably.

In the second district, Kyuma Fumio, Japan's first ever defense minister, faces Fukuda Eriko, the twenty-eight-year-old leader of the Kyushu group of victims of Hepatitis-tainted blood transfusions, handpicked by Ozawa to run against Kyuma. Kyuma is clearly worried after having years of being reelected comfortably. Like Koga Makoto in Fukuoka, Kyuma's vote shares have gradually declined in recent elections. Kyuma may also suffer from memories of the remarks regarding the Nagasaki bombing in 2007 that led to his resignation as defense minister. With the DPJ focused on defeating Kyuma, Fukuda might win the upset.

Tanigawa Yaichi, the LDP's incumbent in the third district, has fought close elections with the DPJ's Yamada Masahiko in the past two elections, winning by 6,000 votes in 2003 and 9,000 votes in 2005. Yamada won PR seats in both elections. Reporting suggests that Tanigawa is confident that he can retain his seat on the back of Komeito support in the district, as is the LDP's Kitamura Seigo in the fourth district, who faces DPJ candidate Miyajima Daisuke. Miyajima won a by-election in the district in 1998 as an LDP candidate but lost to Kitamura by 30,000 votes in 2005.

The result could be a split in Nagasaki.

Kumamoto

In Kumamoto in 2005 the LDP won four seats and the DPJ won one.

The DPJ's Matsumoto Yorihisa (first district) will win the seat he first won in 2000.

In the second district the LDP's Hayashida Takeshi, running again in the SMD after alternating with Noda Takeshi in a Costa Rica arrangement, faces DPJ newcomer Fukushima Kenichiro and should win the district.

The third district was won by the late Matsuoka Toshikatsu in 2005, and was won by independent Sakamoto Tetsushi in the by-election following Matsuoka's suicide. Sakamoto has since joined the LDP, and faces the DPJ's Goto Hidetomo and former LDP member Miura Issui, running as an independent. It seems, however, that Sakamoto and Miura may divide the support of groups that have traditionally supported the LDP. Nevertheless, the DPJ has never done well in the district, and the winner will be either Sakamoto or Miura. Miura may edge out Sakamoto, who did the same to Matsuoka running as an independent in 2003.

In the fourth district LDP incumbent Sonoda Hiroyuki should win reelection easily, as should Kaneko Yasushi in the fifth district.

The LDP will win three, the DPJ one, and an independent conservative one.


Oita

The LDP took two seats and the DPJ one in Oita in 2005.

The DPJ's Kira Shuji (first district), who first won as an independent in 2003 and won reelection in 2005, should win the seat again.

In the second district, the SDPJ may be poised to pick up a seat, as Shigeno Yasumasa runs for the third time against LDP incumbent Eto Seishiro. Shigeno lost by 21,000 votes in 2005, closing the gap from 2003 and earning Shigeno a PR seat. With no JCP candidate running this time — the JCP received nearly 15,000 votes in 2005 — Shigeno could unseat Eto.

In the third district, the DPJ's Yokomitsu Katsuhiko will try for the third time to unseat LDP incumbent Iwaya Takeshi. Yokomitsu, losing by 12,000 votes in 2003 and 15,000 votes in 2005, won PR seats both times. The election will be close, and may ultimately depend on the ability of Yokomitsu to bring out SDPJ voters — Yokomitsu ran in 2003 as an SDPJ candidate before switching to the DPJ, and the two parties had a bitter dispute over who should run in Oita in the 2007 upper house election, resulting in both parties' fielding candidates and the LDP's winning the Oita single-member district.

Iwaya could hold on, with the result that the DPJ wins one, the LDP one, and the SDPJ one.

Miyazaki

Miyazaki is odd: LDP-affiliated candidates won all three seats in 2005, although at the time two of three were running as independent postal rebels (and both had first won in 2003 by running as independents, joining the LDP after the election). The postal rebels have returned to the LDP, but meanwhile, Nakayama Nariaki (first district), the one LDP member who did win in 2005 and is now known for resigning three days after taking office as Aso's transport minister due to comments about Nikkyoso, initially announced that he would retire but changed his mind and is now running as an independent, albeit as an independent with the support of senior LDP leaders like Machimura Nobutaka.

In the first district, the field includes, in addition to Nakayama, LDP-related independent Uesugi Mitsuhiro, a former upper house member who ran as the LDP candidate in the second district in 2005 and lost, Kawamura Hidesaburo, a former MAFF official running as an independent with DPJ, SDPJ, and PNP backing, and a JCP candidate. I suspect that Nakayama will win reelection.

Eto Taku, a postal rebel who returned to the LDP, is seeking another term in the second district, facing the DPJ's Dokyu Seichiro and an independent. Eto will likely win reelection.

In the third district, Furukawa Yoshihisa should win reelection easily.

With Nakayama likely to return to the LDP after the election, the LDP will presumably win three seats in Miyazaki.

Kagoshima

Although the LDP did not win all five seats in 2005, it is now defending all five seats in Kagoshima.

The DPJ's best chance of picking up a seat is in the first district, where LDP incumbent Yasuoka Okiharu faces the DPJ's Kawauchi Hiroshi, who has lost to Yasuoka by roughly 20,000 votes the past two elections and 9,000 votes in 2000, winning PR seats each time. The JCP is fielding a candidate and independent Yamashita Junichi is running, but Kawauchi may manage to win the district this time.

The LDP candidate in the second district, Tokuda Takeshi, was elected as an independent in 2005 but migrated to the LDP and now faces DPJ candidate Uchikoshi Akashi, a former prefectural assemblyman. As the DPJ has never fielded a candidate in the district, it is unclear how the DPJ brand will do. Uchikoshi ran as an independent in 2005 and received nearly 45,000 votes, but Tokuda and the LDP candidate combined for nearly 160,000 votes. Tokuda will probably be reelected.

In the third district, the PNP may be poised to pick up a seat as the joint PNP-DPJ candidate, Matsushita Tadahiro, finished second in 2005 to the LDP's Miyaji Kazuaki, but the DPJ vote combined with Matsushita's votes would have bested Miyaji.

The DPJ candidate in the fourth district is former Rengo Kagoshima vice president Minayoshi Inao, who faces LDP incumbent Ozato Yasuhiro. Ozato has consistently beaten opposition candidate by 40,000 votes and should win again.

Moriyama Hiroshi, the LDP's former postal rebel incumbent in the fifth district, won by 55,000 votes of an LDP "assassin" in 2005 and in 2003 defeated the DPJ's candidate by nearly 100,000 votes. He will be reelected.

The LDP will win three seats, the DPJ one, and the PNP one.

Okinawa

In Okinawa in 2005 the LDP won two seats, the SDPJ won one, and a DPJ-backed independent who has since joined the PNP won one.

In the first district, PNP incumbent Shimoji Mikio should win reelection, as should the SDPJ's Teruya Kantoku in the second district.

The LDP's incumbent in the third district, Kakazu Chiken, won in 2005 because both the DPJ and the SDPJ fielded candidates, Tamaki Deni and Tomon Mitsuko respectively. Once again the two opposition parties will be fielding these candidates, despite their combined vote in 2005 being enough to defeat Kakazu. All that may change this year is that Tamaki finishes second instead of Tomon.

Finally, in the fourth district the LDP's Nishime Kosaburo faces DPJ newcomer Zukeran Chobin. Nishime also won due to a divided field, with the DPJ, JCP, and PNP dividing up 72,000 votes that would have been sufficient to beat Nishime. Zukeran, having the field to himself, may win the district for the DPJ.

The result in Okinawa will be one for the DPJ, one for the LDP, one for the SDPJ, and one for the PNP.

Proportional representation

It is unlikely that the DPJ will run as strong in the Kyushu regional block as it will elsewhere, especially because Komeito will run stronger in Kyushu than it will elsewhere. In 2005, for example, Komeito received nearly 16% of the vote and won three PR seats. The likely PR outcome is for the LDP and the DPJ to reverse their totals, and perhaps the PNP winning a seat instead of the SDPJ, leaving the distribution at nine for the DPJ, seven for the LDP, three for Komeito, one for the JCP, and one for the PNP.

If these predictions, the DPJ will win twenty-four seats, the LDP twenty-five, the PNP three, Komeito three, the SDPJ two, the JCP one, and an independent conservative will win the last seat.

It's not 1954 all over again

At a press conference over the weekend, Okada Katsuya, the DPJ's secretary-general stressed that because Hatoyama will be winning the mandate for the party, Hatoyama should serve a full four-year term (which, Okada stated, a DPJ government will serve so that it is able to accomplish its goals).

After four prime ministers in four years, I can understand why Okada would emphasize that Hatoyama will continue to serve the full term — with the party's 2010 leadership election being no obstacle — but in practical terms, I hope that the DPJ manages to find someone else to govern in Hatoyama's place.

Ultimately this election will not turn on the party leaders. And if the DPJ wins, its success or failure will depend on its ability to make the prime minister less the focus of attention. Kan Naoto and other DPJ officials, after all, have stressed the importance of bolstering the power of the cabinet as an institution, as opposed to the personal power of the prime minister. The LDP's revolving door in its leadership has been a function of an undue emphasis on the man occupying the prime minister's chair (even as the LDP systematically undermined his power).

However, the general election is now less than two weeks away, and undoubtedly as it approaches we will hear more about the clash between Aso Taro and Hatoyama Ichiro, the scions from storied political families now serving as the leaders of the LDP and the DPJ respectively. (We already got a hint of this in the article mentioned here.)

But the interesting thing about this election is how little in common it has with 1954, when Hatoyama Ichiro won the battle to replace Yoshida Shigeru and cleared the way for the creation of the LDP in the process.

Yes, there is the personal interest angle of having these two at the heads of the leading parties in 2009, but what's interesting is not how this shows how little Japan has changed, but rather how much it has changed since 1954. The war between Yoshida and Hatoyama was fought in the proverbial smoke-filled rooms, as conservatives like Kishi worked to assemble a coalition of conservatives that could govern in Yoshida's places.

And today? Two parties, one vaguely center-left, the other center-right, fighting openly, having debates, publishing manifestos, touring the country, the stuff of democracy. For now, it seems like voters will be making their decisions on 30 August more on the basis of these aspects of the campaign than the party's messengers. And if personality matters, it is probably the personality of the candidates in their district rather than that of the distant party leader that matters most. The fact that Hatoyama and Aso are those party leaders is more a coincidence, a function of the odds in favor of hereditary politicians serving in important posts.

But I think the media has a tendency to cast everything in terms of individuals, which is why one reads stories about the role that Aso has played in the downfall of the LDP (when for the most part Aso has simply found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time). Similarly, the drama between Aso and Hatoyama is apparently more compelling than the drama of an opposition party being in a position to defeat the LDP decisively for the first time since the LDP's birth in 1955.

This campaign is unquestionably about the parties: the public's loss of confidence in the LDP as a ruling party (of which Aso is but the tiniest of symptoms), and the DPJ's struggle to convince the public that it can be trusted with power.

The Economist eulogizes the LDP

In its Banyan column, the Economist documents the rise and fall of the Liberal Democratic Party, in effect writing the LDP's obituary before the party's death.

For the most part it is a handy review of a fascinating organization, whose history is virtually synonymous with Japan's postwar political history. Indeed, the genius of the LDP system was that it ensnared everyone: bureaucrats, opposition party politicians, local politicians, the media, interest groups, big business, small business, farmers, and the United States. It was the perfect system for a growing economy tied to an open US economy, for dividing up the pieces of a growing pie. In an era of stagnation, of demographic decline, and of international uncertainty, it is a system that has produced nothing but paralysis. Deprived of resources, the ideal machine for winning elections could well result in a truly historic defeat for the LDP on 30 August.

Some wonder whether Ozawa Ichiro plans to build a new system for perpetual rule around the DPJ, but whatever Ozawa's desires, it is questionable whether a two-party system, based mostly on single-member districts, could sustain the type of policy-election machine constructed by the LDP over the course of the postwar era. Not only do the problems of the age demand decisive action by a centralized government, but because a two-party system contains the risk of being removed at the next election, the ruling party will want to act decisively to implement its policies before going to the voters, as doing so can both boost its electoral chances and possibly bind a victorious opposition party. A ruling party confident in its electoral prospects can be more patient and can comfortably seek the approval of as many actors as possible when formulating policy.

But while the Economist captures this well, it gets the LDP's origins wrong, important if one wants to draw parallels to today's battle between Aso Taro, Yoshida Shigeru's grandson, and Hatoyama Yukio, Hatoyama Ichiro's grandson. The LDP emerged not through Yoshida and Hatoyama's "joining forces" — after all, even the Economist notes that Hatoyama was Yoshida's "nemesis" — but through maneuvering by Liberal Party members dissatisfied with Yoshida who allied with conservatives in the ironically named Progressive Party to form first the Democratic Party and then, once Yoshida had retired, the Liberal Democratic Party. Tellingly, Yoshida refused to participate in the LDP when it formed in 1955. Completely missing from the Economist's story of the LDP's creation is Kishi Nobusuke, Abe Shinzo's grandfather, who first helped create the Democratic Party and then the LDP itself. A history of the rise of the LDP without Kishi is wholly incomplete; for this piece of the story, I strongly recommend Richard Samuels's "Kishi and Corruption: An Anatomy of the 1955 System." [Full disclosure: Samuels is my adviser at MIT.]

The Economist even misattributes the creation of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry to Yoshida, when it was Kishi who was among the founding fathers of MITI.

To quote Chalmers Johnson:

...The struggle of greatest interest to this study occurred between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and MCI [MITI's predecessor].

Most important in this struggle was the fact that the key politician of the postwar years, Prime Minister Yoshida, was an ex-Foreign Office official. Yoshida has always acknowledged that he did not know much about and was more or less uninterested in economics, but he had quite firm views on certain other matters about which he knew a great deal. Two such issues concerned Japan's wartime controlled economy and the economic bureaucrats who cooperated with the military. He deeply disliked both of them. According to many accounts, Yoshida "could not distinguish an MCI official from an insect"; and he was determined to put reliable Foreign Office men over what he regarded as the dangerously national socialist MCI bureaucrats. (pp. 176-177)

The point of this episode is that it reveals the many streams that flowed into the LDP and shaped its history up to the present day. Ex-bureaucrats versus party men; Yoshida versus Kishi; mainstream versus anti-mainstream; Tanaka Kakuei versus Fukuda Takeo; and so on through to Koizumi's struggle against the "opposition forces," to a certain extent an extension of the "war" between Tanaka and Fukuda.

But the LDP as a system of government was finished years ago — this is Nonaka Naoto's argument in his Jiminto seiji no owari [The End of LDP Politics], which describes the shape of the LDP system but opens with the roles played by Ozawa and Koizumi in destroying it — and the LDP being led by Aso into what looks like a certain landslide defeat is merely a shell of the party that governed Japan during the cold war.

An LDP upset in the making?

The LDP continues to set the tone in the non-campaign campaign. Speaking in Hiroshima on the occasion of the sixty-fourth anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb, Prime Minister Aso Taro stressed the existence of "a country with nuclear weapons that could attack as our neighbor," and reiterated the importance of the US nuclear umbrella. That Aso stressed the US nuclear umbrella ought to deflate the impact of the first statement somewhat: if the US nuclear umbrella is adequate to meet the North Korean nuclear arsenal, then the prime minister is suggesting that North Korea can be dealt with in the same way that Japan has dealt with the Russian and Chinese nuclear arsenals. But, of course, Aso's purpose was to call attention to North Korea as a country THAT COULD ATTACK Japan rather than his suggestion that the North Korea could be managed via the same arrangement by which the much larger and sophisticated Russian and Chinese arsenals have been contained.

In other words, another day of the LDP's playing on the public's fears to make its case for a new mandate.

Aso was delivering the same message on a different front in Shimane and Okayama Wednesday, when he attacked the DPJ for its position on a US-Japan FTA. Exhibiting the LDP's full-out reversion to agricultural protectionism — discussed here by Aurelia George Mulgan — Aso stressed, "Agriculture is the foundation of the nation." It is difficult to know whether the LDP's attack on this front is having the desired effect, but I have to figure that the LDP has at least convinced the newly born rural floating voters to think a bit longer about whether to cast their votes for the DPJ. And after a few more weeks? The LDP may have found a winning formula: "The DPJ: it will leave Japan vulnerable to attack and destroy your livelihood." The message seems to be, national defense and some talk of economic growth (and the "once-in-a-century-economic-crisis-originating-from-America") for voters in urban and surburban areas, out-and-out protectionism in rural areas. To a certain extent the LDP is conceding seats to the LDP in urban areas — how much energy is Aso really exerting on behalf of first-termer Koizumi children? — in the hope that an all-out campaign in the countryside can deprive the DPJ of the seats in places where it needs to gain the most ground from past elections. It is trying to neutralize the DPJ's Ozawa-engineered shift to a national strategy complete with a message for rural areas.

And now in the face of the first assault by the LDP the DPJ has stumbled. As Ikeda Nobuo argues, the DPJ has diluted what was a coherent and "strategic" policy designed to destroy what he calls the LDP's "Matsuoka" legacy of particularistic support for inefficient part-time farmers. Okada Katsuya tried to answer the LDP's attack in a press conference in Mie prefecture Wednesday, in which he stated that this matter is simply the LDP's norin zoku stirring up trouble. Not good enough, Mr. Okada. Complaining about the source of the criticism does nothing to blunt the criticism in the eyes of voters. The DPJ has to meet the criticism directly and explain, over and over again, why it's wrong, how the DPJ intends to both support mostly older small farmers and promote the transformation of Japanese agriculture through trade liberalization.

[As an aside, it bears mentioning what the LDP is doing here. The LDP is basically saying that the DPJ will destroy the livelihood of farmers by opening the domestic market to the country responsible for defending them from attack. It bears mentioning that the DPJ's proposal is aimed precisely at the fundamental principle of the US-LDP alliance, that security comes first and that economics should be isolated from the alliance or not discussed at all. The LDP's friends in Washington have been all to happy to push this line, especially after the revisionist excesses of the early 1990s. But presumably there is some happy medium between paying scant attention to the economic dimension of the relationship and a virtual trade war.]

Time will tell whether the LDP's political strategy will bear fruit. But politically speaking, sowing doubt and exploiting fear is perhaps the only way the LDP can with this general election. It certainly cannot win on the basis of its policy achievements since 2005.

The DPJ needs to hone its message

By any measure, the DPJ enjoys a considerable advantage over the LDP with less than two weeks until the campaign officially begins on 18 August. It is ahead in polls, Hatoyama Yukio, its leader, is uniformly preferred to Prime Minister Aso Taro, and there is a widespread feeling that the public is disgusted enough by LDP rule that it is already to throw the bums out (finally!) and put the DPJ in power in its place.

But despite all that, the DPJ has not sewn up the general election. While I think Nakagawa Hidenao's argument that the DPJ has already peaked in public opinion polls is a bit of wishful thinking on his part, there are an awful lot of undecided voters whose decisions over the next few weeks will determine which way the wind blows on 30 August.

But beyond the existence of undecided voters, the DPJ could lose the general election simply because it has been generally poor at political communications. This is not a new problem. (Remember this?) The DPJ has had so much help from the LDP over the past several years that it has had to do relatively little communicating of its own in order to put itself in a position to win this month. The party has done a decent enough job at devising a realistic manifesto that, whatever its shortcomings, does show that the DPJ is serious about governing. But the manifesto won't sell itself. And it won't counter the LDP's charge that the DPJ cannot be trusted with power because it won't defend Japan.

Watch this video of Aso speaking outside Sakuragicho station in Yokohama Tuesday:



From about the eight-minute mark, the prime minister goes into a long discourse on the importance of defending that which must be defended, on the importance of a forthright national security policy in the face of a nuclear North Korea and the contrast between the DPJ and LDP on this front. While I think Aso's claim that the general election should be a choice based on policy is a bit silly (elections are always about more than just policy), Aso is working hard to redefine this election campaign along terms more friendly to the DPJ. "Defend what should be protected." Repeated enough, this message could sink in among the public and make the public think twice about turning over power to an untested DPJ.

Contrast Aso's remarks in Yokohama with Hatoyama Yukio's remarks Tuesday next door in Kamakura.



While Hatoyama does address Aso's leadership deficiencies, at times it seems as if he's campaigning against the bureaucracy instead of the LDP. His stump speech is a bit all over the place. He begins getting to the kind of message the DPJ needs to deliver about eight minutes in when he asks why Japan has become a world leader in suicides among its young people. But then he starts talking about Aso's anime "palace," which, while a bit humorous, is a bit off message. Hatoyama and his party need to be angry. They need to meet the LDP's talk of the DPJ as an irresponsible party with anger at what Japan has become under LDP rule. They need to tap that sense of anger which is clearly abroad among the public. The message needs to be focused on the LDP. It shouldn't veer off into attacks on the bureaucracy or this or that instance of wasteful spending. It must answer the LDP's description of the DPJ as dangerous with a message that stresses the danger of returning the LDP to power again.

For the moment, I think the LDP is controlling the campaign narrative. Messages like Yosano Kaoru's claim that for the DPJ to deliver on its manifesto it will have to raise the consumption tax to 25% may, regardless of their truth, prove effective at hammering home the dangers of electing the DPJ. Repeated enough, that figure could prove devastating for the DPJ, which is why it must answer it now, before it sticks.

Meanwhile, the DPJ has clearly mishandled the flap over a US-Japan FTA. At the first sign of criticism, it folded: it has announced that it will revise the manifesto to clarify that agriculture will be excluded from negotiations, and it will soften the language to "conclude an FTA" to "promote negotiations for an FTA." In revising its position that DPJ will stress that the income support system will take priority over FTA negotiations. Of course, by doing so, the DPJ's position is now incoherent. As Sasayama Tatsuo suggests, if agriculture were excluded from negotiations, why would the US bother with FTA negotiations?

It's possible that the DPJ could have sold rural voters on the idea of an FTA packed with comprehensive support, if it had explained itself properly. But by sneaking the proposal into the manifesto with little fanfare, the DPJ gave its critics an opportunity to define the party's position. Now it has given a gift to LDP candidates across the country, especially in rural areas in Chugoku, Shikoku, and Kyushu, where the DPJ needs to do better than it ever has done before: the LDP can wave the original manifesto before voters as evidence of the DPJ's desires to destroy Japanese agriculture. It may not be true, but as with Yosano's line about the consumption tax rate, repeat it enough times and enough people may eventually believe it. By vacillating and not defending its own positions, the party looks squishy and weak, and so ends up making mistakes for fear of making mistakes.

The time to answer the LDP's and its allies' criticism is immediately: if the DPJ believes in its manifesto, then it should defend it when attacked. As of now, the LDP, desperate to retain power, appears to have more fight in it than the DPJ. There is plenty of time for the polls to turn.

The LDP opts for fear

With less than a month to the general election, Aso Taro and the LDP continue to face what looks like certain defeat. The DPJ continues to enjoy a sizable and solid lead in public opinion polls, the latest being an Asahi poll that showed the DPJ favored in the proportional representation race by a margin of 39% to 22%.

More significantly, as August began, a meeting of nine private-sector groups (the Twenty-First Century Rincho) — including industrial groups, think tanks, and unions — declared that the LDP-Komeito coalition government had largely failed to deliver on its promises from the 2005 general election. Criticism from Rengo, the private-sector union associated with the DPJ, is not surprising, but the Keizai Doyukai was scathing in its criticism, castigating the coalition for failing to reform how the government taxes and spends as well as the strained social security system. The LDP was lambasted for failing to exercise political leadership, for letting power flow back to bureaucrats and their zoku allies in the LDP. All in all, a failing grade for the government.

What's the LDP to do to pick up some momentum and possibly turn the tide in the two weeks before the election campaign officially begins?

Scare the public, of course.

Aso began his national tour over the weekend with a visit to Niigata, to — you guessed it — the site where Yokota Megumi is said to have been kidnapped from in 1977. Paired with the prime minister's rhetoric — "the DPJ is clearly an irresponsible party" — the message couldn't be any clearer. The LDP, the responsible party, will not only restore growth, but it will bring the abductees home, "defend that which should be defended," including tradition, history, the Imperial Family, the Japanese language, and the national flag. Will the DPJ, he asked at an event in Aichi, fly the flag given its alliance with Nikkyoso [the teachers' union]? Given the results of the aforementioned Asahi poll, which showed that respondents favor the DPJ over the LDP on fixing the government's finances and restoring growth by sizable margins but favor the LDP over the DPJ on foreign and defense policy by a 49% to 27% margin, perhaps the LDP can make up some ground stressing the danger of trusting the DPJ with power — except that of course the public cares about the other two areas (and welfare state issues, not included in this poll) far more than they do about foreign policy. How many voters will be voting on the basis of foreign policy, after all? (Incidentally, while Aso was visiting Niigata and talking solemnly about bringing the abductees home, the abductees' families were alarmed that the LDP had "buried" the abductee issue in the manifesto, as they insist that rescuing the abductees is the "greatest national issue.")

But the LDP will be happy to run with this line — and it will undoubtedly be happy for the support from friends in Washington echoing the party line on the "irresponsible" DPJ. For example, Armchair Asia points to remarks from Michael Green about the DPJ's having "no plan for transferring power," a statement that is an outright lie. One could argue about the quality of the party's transition plan but the plan's existence is not a matter of opinion. And, incidentally, its plans for transition are not secret. It has been making the plan's contents known in the months leading up to the election.

The LDP stands naked before the voters as a party that stands for nothing more (or less) than staying power. This is true of all political parties to a certain extent, but most parties do a better job covering their naked ambition with ideological or programmatic clothing. Accordingly, the coverage provided by the LDP's manifesto is thin indeed: LDP rule will endure on the basis of green policies to draw in urban voters and outright protectionism and subsidies for the traditional supporters among farmers and small- and medium-sized enterprises.

How long is it, however, before the DPJ responds to the relentless LDP attack on the DPJ's ability to wield power? This campaign is far from over, after all. DPJ President Hatoyama Yukio has begun taking a more aggressive line of attack, criticizing the LDP for its "failures" in campaign stops over the weekend. He characterized the LDP's manifesto as "utter nonsense" and ridiculed Aso's plans for an "anime palace" as wasteful. It's a start, but the DPJ needs to remind voters that the LDP — in its mismanagement of government over the past four years, not to mention the years prior — is the dangerous party, the party that has run up the national debt, postponed social security reform, tax reform, labor-market reform, and so forth. The message is simple: the only dangerous course of action is trusting the LDP with power for another term.

The LDP's newspeak

At a poorly organized press conference at LDP headquarters Friday evening, the LDP released its manifesto for the 2009 general election.

The problem with having governed a country for as long as the LDP has is that any policy proposal can be met with the question, "If this is so important, why haven't you already done it?" Few of the problems facing the Japanese political system are new problems — the LDP has overseen the collapse of the old socio-economic system and has done too little to build anything in its place. Accordingly, the LDP manifesto should be read with this in mind. Any promise the LDP makes in this election campaign must be balanced against the party's long and disappointing record in power.

Administrative reform: Like the DPJ manifesto, the LDP manifesto opens by calling for administrative reform: redistributing power to localities, banning amakudari, cutting waste from the budget, and trimming the size of both the lower and the upper houses by more than a third after 2010.

Livelihood: It then proceeds to discuss livelihood issues. First and foremost, the LDP promises to reduce the cost of raising young children, making kindergarten free within three years. Like the DPJ, the LDP wants to reduce the costs of secondary and tertiary education. It promises a new system of employment support for young Japanese and women, as well as a "Hello Work" system for mothers. It supports a ban on the short-term employment of non-regular workers. Not surprisingly given Aso Taro's views on the subject, the LDP calls for the creation of a job bank for older citizens still capable of working. This section concludes with a vague plan to improve the quality of nursing care within three years and increase the number of doctors — and to introduce what the party calls "new public works" connected to the well-being of the citizenry.

These two sections constitute what the LDP describes as turning "minuses into pluses" (complete with large plus and minus signs). The subsequent three sections involve converting pluses into more pluses.

Safety net: The fundamental principle of the LDP's thinking on the safety net is that a high level of support is impossible without the public's bearing some of the burden. It acknowledges the national debt problem, proposes to fix it within ten years, and promises fundamental tax reform in the meantime. It will fix the social security system by directing consumption tax revenue to social security, introduce social security numbers and cards, and create an "easily understood" system.

It then moves to education, in which the LDP once again stresses the importance of moral education to strengthen traditional culture. Unlike the DPJ manifesto, the LDP actually directly refers to the DPJ, criticizing it for its ties with Nikkyoso, the teachers' union that is a favorite enemy of the LDP. Perhaps reflecting Aso's Olympic experience, the manifesto has several lines on sports policy: the LDP will create a sports agency to provide top-level athletic education and promote regional sports. Of course, the party also supports bringing the Olympics to Tokyo in 2016, "for children's dreams."

This section also includes the party's plans for agriculture —which are only worth mentioning because the mercantilism is explicit. The LDP wants to raise Japan's rate of self-sufficiency in agriculture to more than 50%, while promoting exports at the same time.

Foreign policy: Foreign and security policy is another area that the LDP promises to deliver positive sum gains. Aside from a proposal to create and hasten the work of a constitution revision investigative committee in the Diet, this section is more a statement of principles than a list of proposals. The LDP will continue to do what it has been doing: foreign dispatch of the JSDF to fight terror and support peace, take a hard line in negotiations over Takeshima and the Northern Territories, build an alliance with the US rooted in trust and featuring close missile defense cooperation, and pursue "realistic" (or perhaps "realist") policies for the defense of Japan.

Economic growth: The LDP is forthright with its goal: 2% growth by 2010. It will realize high-value added industries that promote innovation and the development of the skills of "monozukuri" (making things). Over the next three years, it will generate 40-60 trillion yen of demand and secure 2 million jobs. It will raise Japan into the top class of countries ranked by per-capita GDP.

How will the LDP realize these extraordinary goals? Through a green revolution. It will build a low-carbon society, with the passage of a "Basic Law promoting the creation of a low-carbon society." It will promote green energy, environmental protection, and recycling. The basic law will promote the use of carbon offsets and tax reductions for green housing and vehicles. Like the DPJ, the LDP promises to support small- and medium-sized enterprises so that they can continue to lead in high technology and high-skilled manufacturing. There will be more money for scientific research so that Japan will be the kind of country that receives many Nobel prizes. And because this is Aso's LDP, it will promote popular culture and make a Japan that tourists will want to visit.

But while Aso's fingerprints are all over this manifesto, his message is inserted on pg. 17, including a miniscule picture of the prime minister. When you consider that the cover of the DPJ's manifesto features a picture of Hatoyama Yukio that is perhaps a bit too prominent and includes a letter from the DPJ leader on the first page, it is hard to avoid the impression that the LDP is trying to disassociate itself from its own leader, as if the public will forget who the prime minister is and the party to which he belongs.

The document concludes with a timeline for the implementation of LDP's policies, extending all the way to 2030, when the party aims to have 40% of Japan's energy generated by solar power.

But this document is actually the first of two documents that comprise the party's manifesto. The second is the party's "Policy Bank," an extensive policy document that looks impressive given the amount of verbiage but adds little in the way of detail to the proposals in the first part of the manifesto. It is full of plans, countermeasures, basic laws, and the like, but for all the words, it is hard to identify an underlying reason to give the LDP a new mandate. The LDP identifies goals, principles, and policies, but it is difficult to see how it will get from policy to desired outcome. (Like the party's goal to produce 2% growth in 2010...) One policy outlined in the policy bank that seems to have been missing from the first part is its plan to create a state system. It promises to create a planning group at the prime minister's office and draft a basic law quickly, envisioning the introduction of a state system 6-8 years after passing the basic law. I appreciate decentralization, but I am growing to loathe this proposal, whoever is proposing it. The state system seems to me another policy in a long list of policies that have been viewed as panaceas for Japan's political problems, much like the 1994 electoral reform was supposed to be. Introducing a state system would be as difficult for an LDP government as it would be for a DPJ government, seeing as it would involve extensive negotiations among local and national politicians and bureaucrats with the potential for dragging on for longer than 6-8 years. (A group of eight governors recently provided a taste of the opposition that would greet this process, arguing that a state system would widen disparities between regions.)

Of interest in the policy bank is a section entitled simply "Responsibility." This section includes a discussion of fiscal reconstruction — including the party's pronouncement that it will cut waste — but also foreign and security policy, the environmental revolution, and administrative and political reform. The message, of course, is that the LDP will deliver these policies responsibly, unlike the DPJ. Indeed, this message is reinforced by a section at the LDP's website that addresses the ways in which the DPJ will endanger Japan. Responsibility, especially as it pertains to security policy, was also a central theme in Aso's remarks introducing the manifesto. Talk of responsibility from a party that has presided over what has become Japan's lost two decades strikes me as nothing more than newspeak. The party that punted on issue after issue will be the party that acts decisively to reform Japan. The party that not only presided over the economic disaster of the 1990s but has now presided over a recession in which unemployment has risen to 5.4% (a number which economist Noguchi Yukio reminds readers understates the unemployment contained within companies) will somehow stimulate enough domestic demand over the next year to produce 2% growth. And it will do it without throwing money around, because, as Aso said, the DPJ has promised baramaki different from the LDP by an order of magnitude. Of course, it's easy for Aso to say that, seeing as how the LDP manifesto, for all the verbiage, lacks precise figures for how much the LDP will spend on its various programs (an omission Hatoyama and other opposition politicians did not fail to notice). Say what you will about the DPJ manifesto, but the party worked hard to keep itself to proposals it could write into legislation within a single four-year term. Its policy timeline, unlike the LDP's, does not involve goals 20, 30, or 40 years into the future. And whatever questions remain about the figures, at least the DPJ provided figures for how much it plans to spend on its programs.

But the LDP is the responsible party, and the DPJ will endanger Japan's future. I suppose when reality is as bleak as it is, the LDP has no choice but to resort to euphemism and outright fantasy. As George Orwell wrote, "Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." The DPJ has its own problems with political language in its manifesto, particularly its failure to address the economic crisis directly (discussed here), but the LDP's notion that this election marks a choice between a responsible party and a dangerously irresponsible party is an insult to reason.

Aso's strenuous life

In the last analysis a healthy state can exist only when the men and women who make it up lead clean, vigorous, healthy lives; when the children are so trained that they shall endeavor, not to shirk difficulties, but to overcome them; not to seek ease, but to know how to wrest triumph from toil and risk. The man must be glad to do a man's work, to dare and endure and to labor; to keep himself, and to keep those dependent upon him. The woman must be the housewife, the helpmeet of the homemaker, the wise and fearless mother of many healthy children. — Theodore Roosevelt, "The Strenuous Life," 10 April 1899

As Japan debates another indiscreet remark by Prime Minister Aso Taro — the chief cabinet secretary has already dismissed it as evidence of the prime minister's "inadequate linguistic ability" — it is worth considering precisely what the prime minister intended to say, and what it reveals about his way of thinking. After all, as Michael Kinsley said, "A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth."

Speaking on Saturday at meeting in Yokohama of the Junior Chamber, an organization Aso headed in 1978, the prime minister remarked on the role of citizens over 65 years old in Japanese society. "How should we use very energetic old people?" he asked. "These people are all different, but please consider that they only have the talent to work." The prime minister couldn't quite understand why he was being criticized for his remarks. At a speech in Sendai Saturday evening he stressed that his intention was to note that since Japan has many vital senior citizens, they ought to be given opportunities "to participate in society."

It is unclear to me why Aso's remarks are being treated as a gaffe. He has made no secret of his belief that — perhaps projecting from his own experience as a "vital" senior citizen — that the elderly should work if they're able. He said it in his speech opening this year's ordinary Diet session. He discussed it in his 2007 book Totetsumonai Nihon (as mentioned here). And some may recall that in November of last year he voiced his annoyance at having his tax payments go to support the infirm elderly. Aso's phrasing this time around may have been indelicate, although I would argue his remarks about senior citizens who do nothing but eat and drink was substantially worse. The point is that there is a consistent worldview and should therefore not be treated as simply another gaffe by the "linguistically challenged" prime minister.

Which brings us to the Theodore Roosevelt quote with which I opened this post. Theodore Roosevelt's speech "The Strenuous Life" might be the most complete statement of Roosevelt's worldview, an ode to the vigorous life, which Roosevelt argued was both a metaphor for the nation in international politics and also the literal bedrock for national greatness. The speech, considering that it was given following the US victory over Spain in 1898, not surprisingly ends with a rousing call for the United States to not "sit huddled within our own borders," to develop the army and the navy and take up the "White Man's Burden," as Kipling advised the US the same year Roosevelt delivered his speech in Chicago.

Having read enough of Aso's worldview, and the worldview of other Japanese conservatives, I could not help but think of Roosevelt when I read that Aso had virtually called upon Japan's elderly to live the strenuous life. I do not think the similarity is accidental. Not that Aso and his colleagues have drawn directly from Roosevelt's writings, but rather that their thinking is ultimately drawn from the same late nineteenth century Romanticism tinged with Social Darwinism that underlay Roosevelt's thinking. It is not an accident that Roosevelt admired Meiji Japan's achievements — alluded to here — right up until he came to see Japan as a threat to America's own pursuit of national greatness. Roosevelt's stress on work, toil, and strife at home and the pursuit of greatness abroad have clear echoes in contemporary Japanese conservative rhetoric (and, I should add, among certain American conservatives, at least at one point in time).

The idea of a Japanese work ethic, that Japan can overcome any of its problems if its people simply work harder, has been in a common theme in Aso's remarks as prime minister — especially in his initial comments when the global financial crisis had clearly reached Japanese shores and Aso was convinced Japan would be the first developed country to escape the recession. It animates his idea of Japan's "latent power." And it certainly is behind his idea that elderly Japanese, if they're able, should not be easing into a comfortable retirement but should instead continue working past sixty-five.

What does this intellectual lineage mean precisely? Well, not much, unless you find Roosevelt's bellicose vision of the "strenuous life" woefully out of place in twenty-first century Japan. It seems to me that the Japanese public is perfectly content with what Roosevelt disparaged as "a life of slothful ease, a life of that peace which springs merely from lack either of desire or of power to strive after great things." Having spent the twentieth century striving, many Japanese seem perfectly content to leave the striving to others and enjoy a life of peace and prosperity.