Trouble in Ichigaya

Ishiba Shigeru, defense minister and self-described "defense otaku," is getting a lesson in bureaucratic politics.

The Minami commission, a public-private consultative body at the Kantei convened under the chairmanship of Minami Naoya, an adviser to Tokyo Electric, has been deliberating on reform of the Defense Ministry since December. The commission formed in response to the corruption scandals at the Defense Ministry that came to light last autumn, but the deliberations have widened to include information security and the organization of the ministry as a whole, in addition to corruption.

Mr. Ishiba has been particularly eager to reorganize the department, consolidating the ministry's five bureaus into three and mixing civilian and military personnel. What the latter means in practical terms is still unclear — as Mr. Ishiba suggested in this press conference and as revealed in the commission's documents — but both proposals are already drawing fire from the JSDF, the civilian members of the commission, and certain members of the LDP. Not surprisingly, there is also opposition from within the ministry. Reducing the number of bureaus, and therefore the number of administrative positions, will necessarily anger the ministry's bureaucrats.

The underlying problem is probably money. A departmental reorganization would be much easier to accept if the agency/ministry's budget had been rising instead of falling over the past decade. Each bureau — and JSDF service — is already in a defensive crouch, fighting to preserve its share of a shrinking budget. It is unlikely that they will accept reform proposals that attenuate their power within the defense establishment. At the same time, they will also fight for every platform possible, including platforms of questionable value.

If opposition is in fact coming from politicians, the uniformed services, and the defense bureaucracy, Mr. Ishiba's reform project is doomed before it even gets enshrined in an interim report. (The Minami Commission's mid-term report, originally due in February, has been postponed until June.) With no signs that the defense budget will grow anytime soon, the Defense Ministry's current organization is probably here to stay.

Who is Fukuda Yasuo?

Another day has passed, and it looks ever clearer that Fukuda Yasuo has cemented enough support to ensure his victory in the Sept. 23rd LDP presidential election. As this Asahi article notes, Mr. Fukuda has apparently gained the support of 298 Diet members, which is well over the necessary 264 votes he needs to win. (The total number of votes in the election is 528, divided between 387 Diet members and 141 prefectural chapter representatives [three from each prefecture].) Mr. Aso is trying to stay in the race by making up lost ground in the regions so to reverse Mr. Fukuda's momentum, but talking about the aged, the sick, and the left-behind, while important, will probably not be enough to reverse the flash flood that has all but drowned Mr. Aso's campaign.

And yet for a man about to become Japan's prime minister, it is unclear exactly what to expect. As Jun Okumura wrote, "It's remarkable how little I know of Mr. Fukuda's views." And if he doesn't know, well, then Mr. Fukuda truly is an enigma. (Jun, you're forgiven for referring to him by his father's name — until he declared his candidacy, I had to remind myself constantly that Yasuo is the son, Takeo the father.)

Mr. Fukuda, now trying to sound prime ministerial, has given some hint as to what his priorities will be. "Mr. Koizumi's way of structural reforms is right. Continuing reform is a major premise." On foreign policy, he noted that a concern for him is "how to strengthen relations with Asia on the foundation of the US-Japan alliance."

One thing that might be worth considering is that Mr. Fukuda is by no means an old-style LDP politician, even though his victory, should it happen, will depend on the vicissitudes of faction politics. In fact, he did not enter the Diet until 1990, when his father retired, although he had worked as his father's secretary during the latter's time as prime minister. This means that Mr. Fukuda entered the Diet only three years and one election before Mr. Abe, who is almost twenty years younger. He too, like Mr. Abe, is set to rise to the premiership without extensive service in the cabinet. Unlike Mr. Abe, however, he is older, wiser, and his record 1259 days as chief cabinet secretary mean that he has a deep knowledge of the workings of the government. He is, as Tomohito Shinoda makes clear in Koizumi Diplomacy, a committed centralizer. Mr. Fukuda coordinated the Koizumi government's response to 9/11 and managed the passage of the anti-terror special measures law. Under Fukuda's watch, Shinoda writes, "...There was a power shift from MOFA to the Kantei in the area of foreign and defense affairs, which is a desirable phenomenon. The emergence of the Kantei...has made it easier for the prime minister to exercise leadership." (85) Mr. Fukuda obviously does not deserve all the credit for this development; indeed, former Foreign Minister Tanaka Makiko might be the most responsible for the shift in foreign policy making power away from MOFA at the start of the Koizumi cabinet. But Mr. Fukuda helped execute a drastic shift in policy making power to the Kantei, and I would be surprised if he would be overly deferential to the input of LDP policy making organs and the bureaucracy as prime minister.

Mr. Fukuda clearly comes to the job with a certain proficiency for foreign policy — in other words, neither Mr. Fukuda nor Mr. Aso is campaigning on the basis of concrete plans for the Japanese economy. But as the above statement suggests, the personal animosity between Mr. Koizumi and Mr. Fukuda clearly does not extend to the realm of (domestic) policy. As for foreign policy, unlike Messrs. Abe and Koizumi, Mr. Fukuda will not only not go to Yasukuni Shrine, but he might even come out and say that he will not go to Yasukuni Shrine. (He's also a vice-chairman of the Diet member's association in support of the Beijing Olympics, an organization headed by Kono Yohei, and featuring a number of reputed LDP "doves" as vice-chairmen. ) He is clearly not one to prioritize ideological gestures over good and proper policy, meaning that from the start he could not possibly be as miserable a prime minister as Mr. Abe. He has also inherited an interest in maintaining sound relations with Asian powers from his father — author of the Fukuda Doctrine.

In some way, a Fukuda cabinet could be like rewinding the clock to the early weeks of the Abe cabinet, when people were hopeful that Mr. Abe would both restore balance to Japanese foreign policy by concentrating on Asian diplomacy and preserve Mr. Koizumi's emphasis on structural reform.

Unfortunately for Mr. Fukuda, it is no longer October 2006: the LDP's fissures have been laid bare, the DPJ has been calling the tune on the policy agenda, and relations with the US are troubled. He will likely be able to calm some of the tension with Washington, even if he will find it difficult, if not impossible, to give the US what it wants on the anti-terror legislation. His moderation may also serve to embarrass the DPJ before the public, making Mr. Ozawa's aggressive campaigning for an early election look inappropriate given the new mood that Mr. Fukuda would likely convey. But I don't expect him to solve the urban-rural dilemma facing the LDP.

Who's in charge here?

MTC asks an extremely pertinent question about which I have been wondering all week.

While pleasantly surprised by the new cabinet, MTC wonders who exactly was responsible for picking the new lineup. Mr. Abe no doubt has many people whispering in his ear — perhaps he would think more clearly if that wasn't the case — but it is necessary to ask whose guidance was decisive in shaping the new cabinet.

And now that the cabinet and the new party leadership are in place, it's equally important to ask who will be calling the shots; I remain unconvinced that the new cabinet is Mr. Abe's in anything but name only. Not his agenda, not his way of operating — and perhaps not even his people.

One major player will no doubt be new LDP secretary-general Aso Taro. Asahi writes today about Aso's consolidation of power through his control over the new personnel appointments, through which he sought to disarm critics and favor the factions (leading to new widely voiced fear that this cabinet marks a return to the old LDP). For example, Aso named Kosaka Kenji, organizer of an anti-Abe study group, as deputy of the party's Diet strategy committee. In the process, the influence of Mr. Koizumi within the party may be waning, as his followers in the Koizumi non-faction, anti-faction faction have found themselves blocked from power. Koizumi's followers, however, insist that it will benefit them in the long run: "This latest lineup is a reversion. With this, there will be a rise in new Diet members who think 'I will not join a faction.'"

I think such optimism might be misplaced, but at the same time, despair about the return of the old LDP is also misplaced. The old LDP has been destroyed, as promised by Mr. Koizumi. There is no going back to the old way of collusion between bureaucracy and LDP policy specialists and factions, at the expense of the cabinet.

What seems to be emerging instead is a tighter union between party and cabinet. The policy initiating powers of the Kantei have grown, but more at the expense of PARC than of the bureaucracy, which seems to have recovered, at least partially, from its mid-1990s nadir. (The vacuum created by Mr. Abe's poor leadership has undoubtedly helped this process along.) In the new cabinet, we may see a more cohesive LDP working with the bureaucracy as a whole to form policy, thanks to the presence of Mr. Yosano at the head of cabinet secretariat. An article in today's Asahi, not online of course, talks about the new chief cabinet secretary's "respect for the bureaucracy," suggesting that with his hand at the controls of government, the LDP will move further away from the anti-bureaucratic populism of Mr. Koizumi.

Recognizing the shifting balance is an important corrective, at least partially, to the argument made by Tomohito Shinoda in his recent book Koizumi Diplomacy, in which he outlines the emergence of the Kantei as a policy actor in its own right, especially in security policy. Shinoda is not wrong to point to various cases in the past two decades in which the Kantei has played a decisive role in decision making, but as the title implies, the key factor in his cases was often having the right personnel in place (whether Mr. Ozawa as an assistant CCS in the late 1980s or Mr. Koizumi as prime minister) than any permanent institutional change. If there's one constant in Japanese politics, it's that the formal institutions and rules often matter less than the informal arrangements grounded in custom, culture, and personality. The balance of power within the government can change greatly depending on who is sitting where.

Accordingly, the bureaucracy's comeback is due to continue under the second Abe cabinet, thanks both to accommodative, cautious leadership in the LDP and stalemate due to the DPJ's control of the Upper House.

A gift to Bush?

Prime Minister Abe has announced the formation of a special study group chaired by former Japanese ambassador to the US Yanai Shunji to study rolling back restrictions on Japan's exercise of its right of collective self-defense in limited cases, including, according to the Yomiuri Shimbun, (1) the use of missile defense to destroy a ballistic missile targeting an ally (i.e., the US, (2) in the event of an attack on allied ships sailing with MSDF ships on the high seas, (3) in the event of an attack on another country's forces engaged in reconstruction (i.e., in a situation similar to the ASDF deployment in Iraq), and (4) to resist in the case of efforts to obstruct UN peacekeeping operations.

The prohibition on the exercise of the right of collective self-defense is the product of a long-standing constitutional interpretation drafted by the Cabinet Legislation Bureau, which means, of course, that a re-interpretation can make collective self-defense permissible in these cases. But the study group is informal and its recommendations non-binding; as reported in the Japan Times, a move to permit collective defense in any circumstances is likely to draw opposition both within and outside the government.

This is an important step, because it is the prohibition on collective self-defense that has prevented the US-Japan alliance from becoming a proper alliance in which each ally is committed to the defense of the other. It signals that the bounds of acceptable discourse on Japanese security policy continue to expand, and that the expansion of the Kantei's top-down policy making powers -- which may soon include a national security council, the legislation having been submitted to the Diet last week -- continues unabated in security policy. Just how much stronger the Kantei has become will depend, of course, on how the collective self-defense review process resolves.

The timing of this study group, meanwhile, is important, giving Abe concrete evidence of his government's steps to strengthen the alliance to present to President Bush at the end of the month. (The Japan Times thinks that Abe may be trying to change the subject away from comfort women.)

In the case of the latter, at this point I doubt there is much that Abe can do to change the subject, and as for the former, I don't think the US government will be assuaged by the creation of a study group, given that there is still a long way to go before Japan can be called a "normal" country. The obstacles to embracing even limited collective self-defense are many.

(The editorial cartoon left, from Yomiuri, shows Bush and Abe embracing each other, bound by "falling rates of support"; the captions reads "Believe in each other?")