A new dawn?

On Thursday, Masuzoe Yoichi, former minister of health, labor, and welfare and the most popular politician in Japan, will inform the LDP that he is exiting the party. On Friday, he will announce the formation of his own party (for now, the Masuzoe New Party), which is projected to have enough members to clear the five-member minimum to be considered a party and be eligible for public election funds. Whether and how many LDP members will follow Masuzoe out remains to be seen, but if Masuzoe has decided to exercise his exit option instead of trying to reform the LDP from within, who among the LDP's reformists will continue to try to force the party's leadership to change its way?

Masuzoe's decision comes after the LDP virtually dared Masuzoe to leave: at a meeting of LDP Diet members last week, several members suggested that if Masuzoe isn't willing to work with the executive he should leave. Similarly, Tanose Ryotaro, head of the LDP's general council, recently questioned Masuzoe's sincerity.

Perhaps one sure consequence of Masuzoe's departure is that it will spell the end of the LDP as an important factor in Japanese politics. The LDP does indeed appear hellbent on its own destruction. Instead of taking Masuzoe's criticisms seriously, the leadership instead goaded the one politician that LDP candidates can stand to be seen with into bolting the party. Just as the LDP quickly turned its back on Koizumi Junichiro's agenda once he left the premiership, the LDP seems determined to reject any politician from within its own ranks who wants to drag the party into the twenty-first century. Now stripped of the interest groups that supported it for so long, the LDP has failed to reinvent itself for the age of floating voters and is rapidly becoming a loose alliance of koenkai. As more politicians leave the party, it becomes harder to imagine that the LDP will ever adapt.

Where does that leave the Japanese political system?

On the whole, it might make the DPJ-led government better. The Masuzoe New Party and Your Party surely stand poised to pick up a decent share of seats in this summer's House of Councillors election. In doing so, they will force the DPJ-led government — assuming that the government does not call a double election, which seems a reasonable assumption after Sengoku Yoshito was roundly criticized for raising the idea — to cobble together a coalition in the upper house in order to pass its legislation (or else governed by the cumbersome Article 59 procedure). Both Masuzoe and Watanabe Yoshimi and his colleagues in the YP are serious about policy, and in Masuzoe's case in particular, he is serious about addressing the social concerns of the Japanese people. Having to negotiate with these two parties may make the policymaking process more unwieldy (counter to the spirit of the government's administrative reforms), but it may result in better policy. And when the government fails to measure up, they will be formidable critics, much more formidable critics than the LDP has been in opposition.

Moreover, as I've argued before, Masuzoe's departure will put pressure on Hatoyama Yukio and Ozawa Ichiro as a DPJ member's threat to exit the party has more power with Masuzoe's party as a destination. That's not to say that the new party will immediately trigger an exodus of DPJ members but it does raise the likelihood that Hatoyama will face a revolt, perhaps from within his own cabinet with the likely failure to solve Futenma by the end of May the convenient excuse for the palace coup. Even if Hatoyama and Ozawa survive until the HC election, a defeat in that election could clear the way for new leaders who will be better able to deliver upon DPJ's reform program.

Replacing the LDP with a motley group of small parties may not seem like an improvement, but with Masuzoe in the mix, that group immediately has stature that it would not otherwise have. Masuzoe is not about to ride a wave of popular support into the premiership, not without a general election being called (and Masuzoe's defection probably makes a snap election even less likely). The DPJ will now face opposition parties that can credibly challenge the DPJ to live up to its own promises for reform.

Exit, voice, and loyalty in the LDP

On Saturday, Yosano Kaoru, onetime contender for the LDP presidency and the Aso cabinet's second finance minister, met with LDP President Tanigaki Sadakazu and filed notice that he will leave the party from next week. Sonoda Hiroyuki, Yosano's ally who was forced to resign as a deputy secretary-general last month over criticism of Tanigaki, is expected to follow Yosano out of the party soon.

Both are said to be considering joining up with Hiranuma Takeo, the postal rebel who refused to rejoin the LDP with other erstwhile rebels in 2006. Hiranuma has been talking about forming a conservative party that could serve as a "third pole" in Japanese politics since at least October 2007, in the immediate aftermath of Abe Shinzo's stunning fall from the premiership. After years of hinting at creating a new party, Hiranuma apparently feels that the time is right now, and he will launch his party sometime this month so to prepare to contest this summer's House of Councillors election.

That Hiranuma has waited until now to launch his party suggests to me Hiranuma hopes to fill an electoral niche that does not exist. Where is the demand for another conservative party? Who is clamoring for Hiranuma's third pole? As I've argued before in regard to Hiranuma's quest to build a "true" conservative party, the project is little more than fantasy.

So what of Yosano's unusual alliance with Hiranuma, given that Yosano has been anything but an adherent of the "true" conservatism? No one seems to have a good explanation for it. Sonoda suggested that if they form a new party, it would be close to the LDP in policy terms, in other words, the Hiranuma new party, unlike Watanabe Yoshimi's "neoliberal-ish" Minna no tō, would not be carving out a new niche for itself.

What does Yosano's decision to leave the party mean for the LDP? Following on the heels of Hatoyama Kunio's departure — making Yosano the second Aso cabinet member to leave in under the span of a month — Yosano's departure appears to suggest that exit is growing more attractive to would-be reformers. That's not to say that there aren't LDP members exercising voice. Tanigaki is under relentless pressure from LDP members to initiate sweeping party reforms or get out of the way. This past week a meeting of 50 LDP members met to advocate the dissolution of the factions, to which Tanigaki could only say that if they didn't like factions they didn't have to be in them. Meanwhile, Nakagawa Hidenao criticized the LDP president for failing to stand up for postal privatization in his debate with Prime Minister Hatoyama. And Masuzoe Yoichi continues to be the most vociferous critic of Tanigaki and the LDP executive, castigating the party's leaders for "lacking the will, the ability, and the strategy" necessary to lead the LDP.

But despite the exercise of both exit and voice by LDP reformists, Tanigaki continues to enjoy the support of an inner circle of faction leaders and other party chieftains, at least judging by their silence. Yosano, like Masuzoe, is a maverick, albeit a prominent maverick. Not belonging to any faction, Yosano is if anything best know for his lonely fight in favor of fiscal austerity and open calls for a consumption tax increase, positions that did not earn him a wide following within the LDP. Neither Yosano nor Masuzoe, however, has the numbers to back their actions and force the party's chieftains to act against Tanigaki, at least not before the election.

Both exit and voice in this situation appear to depend on both volume and magnitude: were a faction leader to take his faction out of the party en masse, or to dissolve his faction voluntarily and side with the reformists, those actions might be enough to push the LDP in a new direction. But for now the party is fighting the same battle it has been fighting since Koizumi Junichiro left the premiership. The old guard controls the party, as the reformists, marginalized, struggle to organize and utilize the media as a weapon against the party's leaders. The difference now seems to be that exit has become an increasingly attractive alternative due to public dissatisfaction with both the DPJ and the LDP.

The LDP may yet survive, but it will take lots more voice — or lots more exit — before the party's leaders stand aside and allow the reformists to begin remaking the party so to better compete in a more competitive political environment.

The strange death of the LDP

When the Hosokawa government — with Ozawa Ichiro, then secretary-general of one of the leading parties of the eight-party coalition backing the government — passed electoral reform in 1994, one of the arguments made then and ever since by Japanese politicians (and American political scientists) was that the new mixed single-member district/proportional representation electoral system would produce a British-style two-party system that would complement the British-style administrative and political reforms desired by Ozawa and other politicians.

In other words, the Japanese political system should favor the existence of a second large party to challenge the DPJ, if not the LDP then an LDP-like successor party. But presumably the LDP should be the favorite to survive in the two-party system. By virtue of its existence — by virtue of its possessing institutional infrastructure, finances, an organizational history — the party presumably has an advantage over any party not yet born, not to mention the various micro-parties that stand virtually no chance of expanding to rival the DPJ.

And yet the LDP appears to be stumbling along to destruction. Matsuda Iwao, an LDP upper house member from Gifu prefecture, recently became the fifth LDP member of that chamber to leave the party since the LDP's defeat last year. (Yomiuri suspects the hand of Ozawa, given Matsuda's membership in Ozawa's Japan Renewal and New Frontier parties during the 1990s.)

The party has failed to articulate a policy agenda to challenge the Hatoyama government's, as suggested by the LDP's four-day boycott of Diet budget proceedings — discussed here and here. Aside from calling for the heads of Ozawa Ichiro and Hatoyama Yukio and demanding a new election, the LDP has apparently nothing to say about the problems facing Japan.

Keidanren, an important financial backer of the LDP (2.7 billion yen in 2008, roughly ten per cent of the party's income that year), has once again decided to suspend its political donations, a serious blow to the LDP given that its public subsidies have also shrank due to the extent of its defeat.

Most seriously, at least for the party's current leadership, Masuzoe Yoichi, the popular former minister for health, labor, and welfare and the one party member that LDP candidates wanted to be seen with in 2009, has stepped up his criticism of party leader Tanigaki Sadakazu and other party executives. He has created a new study group with thirty members — the Economic Strategy Research Group, discussed here — but Masuzoe's power may be less in his numbers than in his ability to discredit the party's leaders every time he opens his mouth. Masuzoe provides a constant reminder of just how little the LDP has done to reform itself since losing last August. Indeed, speaking at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan Monday, Masuzoe identified Tanigaki as a cause of low public approval for the LDP and ann obstacle to party reform, and suggested that his resignation would open the way to reform. He did not rule out the possibility of forming a new party or a total political realignment including current DPJ members (including cabinet member Maehara Seiji).

In recent weeks party leaders have begun discussing dissolving the factions once again, an idea that flared up during the post-election leadership campaign only to die shortly after Tanigaki's victory, but abolishing the factions — or referring to them as mere study groups — is at best a cosmetic change and at worse no change at all. The kind of changes the LDP needs to make are the changes the DPJ made over the decade leading up to its taking power: centralizing control over party administration, policymaking, and electoral strategy in a small group around the party leader, and then developing a coherent policy strategy that actually speaks to the public's concerns.

Why has the LDP failed to reform up to this point — and why is it likely to fail to reform in the future, even if Masuzoe gets his way and forces Tanigaki out?

There is no shortage of plausible explanations. One explanation would suggest that the LDP is failing because it is not designed to exist in opposition. For all the headlines grabbed by LDP reformists over the past decade, perhaps most of the party's members may be simply incapable of saying anything of substance to their constituents. There is no longer any public money to do the talking for them. And presumably they also have less access to the bureaucracy, which might otherwise have been able to provide them with ideas and proposals. This problem may be common to other defeated dominant parties struggling to adapt in opposition.

Another — which I think is important — is the composition of the LDP after its defeat. Namely, it has too many senior (read: former ministers) and hereditary politicians in its ranks and not enough followers, especially of the reformist variety. The LDP members who survived 2009 showed that they can get reelected on the strength of their own names and campaign organizations. They owe little to the party headquarters, and, one would assume, they would be less likely to support efforts to centralize control of the party.

A further explanation might consider the role played by the LDP's policy ideas. In this argument, the LDP's internal organization is not irrelevant — the party's organization, after all, has some control of what's included in the party's platform and more generally what narrative the party tells in public — but the more important factor may be the balance of power among ideological camps within the LDP. As noted, Masuzoe has the popularity, but not the numbers within the party (and I find it odd that Masuzoe, who was a critic of Koizumi's "neo-liberal" reforms, is now the face for continuing those reforms). Similarly, the revisionist conservative wing may also lack the numbers — there was some overlap with the Koizumi Children, after all — and its surviving leaders are intimately associated with the LDP's downfall. That leaves the pragmatists, the party leaders who are at once the most flexible and pragmatic in policy terms and also the most wedded to existing party structures. At the same time, the LDP faces the same dilemmas facing any party in opposition in a (mostly) two-party system. Should it copy the governing party's policies and serve as the well-meaning critic in opposition? Or should it adopt a rejectionist pose and rail about the good old days before the DPJ took power? Koizumi's ambiguous legacy as party leader, not to mention the failures of its last prime ministers, makes the latter option difficult, and the LDP seems simply incapable of adopting the former approach. The result is that attacking Hatoyama and Ozawa on the seiji to kane issue appears to be the default option, the problem being that the public doesn't particularly care about money politics relative to other issues, especially when the LDP is the messenger.

Finally, the LDP may be failing to reform for precisely the reason suggested by Masuzoe: Tanigaki is simply not up to the task, being little more than a placeholder upon whom the faction leaders could agree when the party was in chaos following the electoral defeat. It seems dubious that Tanigaki is the primary cause of frustrated reform, but he is certainly not helping the process along.

In short, while it is easy to assume that organizations do whatever necessary to ensure their survival in their environments, making the changes necessary for survival is easier said than done. It may be the case that the survival imperative of individual LDP politicians is trumping the organizational imperative to survive. The LDP's days appear to be numbered, especially if Masuzoe decides that the party is not worth saving.

Whether Masuzoe could build a second party around his splitists, Watanabe Yoshimi's Your Party, and whoever they could coax from the DPJ is an open question. Theories about the effect of the electoral system would predict that Masuzoe's bid would be successful, but the LDP's woeful performance post-election suggests that nothing is for certain. Showing up is not enough: the second party actually has to make the right decisions too. Perhaps Masuzoe, helped by his personal popularity, will make the right decisions and be rewarded with public support and numerous prospective candidates from which to choose. Perhaps he might even draw some DPJ members to a new party.

ON this last question, I suspect that despite the mass media's longing for another political realignment, DPJ reformists close to Masuzoe have greater incentives to exercise voice within the DPJ — given that the party is in government — rather than to exit and join Masuzoe in opposition. In other words, I expect that one consequence of Masuzoe's departure from the LDP would be a rebellion within the DPJ to replace Hatoyama led by the party members most likely to join with Masuzoe — potentially a successful rebellion were the emergence of a Masuzoe New Party to make enough Hatoyama allies nervous about the new rival.

If Masuzoe cannot break the DPJ, the result could be an unusual party system, with the DPJ joined by a rump LDP, a rising but struggling reformist party, and the other smaller parties, including its two coalition partners.

What seems certain is that the LDP will be unable to reverse its decline. The party that seemed uniquely suited to governing may simply be unable to survive an extended period in opposition. Even a good showing in the upper house election this summer — by no means guaranteed — could be negated should Komeito, the LDP's erstwhile partner, continue to move closer to the DPJ.

Masuzoe threatens the LDP

In a press conference at LDP headquarters Tuesday, Masuzoe Yoichi, the upper house member and former cabinet minister who is one of a handful of politicians respected by the public, said that while he will try to do what he can within the LDP, he said that his ultimate aim is a political realignment — and that he would not rule out any possibilities, including leaving the LDP to form his own party.

In the meantime, he is, in the best LDP tradition, forming a study group that will no doubt serve as a focal point for his reform movement.

Masuzoe has, of course, already criticized LDP president Tanigaki Sadakazu for his ineffectual leadership. The question, however, is what Masuzoe can do to realize a political realignment.

To do so he would have to be able to draw defectors away from both the LDP and the DPJ. Doing the latter will be difficult: Ozawa Ichiro has enough carrots and sticks at his disposal to ensure that the DPJ's backbenchers won't stray. Seeing as how the backbenchers thus far have little reason to defect for policy reasons, it is hard to see how Masuzoe could entice DPJ defectors. Which leaves the LDP. While Masuzoe is popular with the public and was a welcome presence on "two-shot" campaign posters for LDP candidates last summer, it is unclear just how much support he has within the LDP. He has prided himself on his independence, which has been good for his public image but bad for his ability to organize LDP members in a reform movement.

Given the current circumstances, a Masuzoe movement could wind up as little different from Watanabe Yoshimi's Your Party, which has been irrelevant since the Hatoyama government took power. And as I've previously discussed, reform within the LDP appears to be at a standstill. Tanigaki welcomed the New Year by calling for the Hatoyama government to resign, dissolve the House of Representatives, and call a snap election. (Seems a bit farcical for the LDP to challenge the DPJ on corruption.)

Reforming the LDP — or, alternatively, building a second major political party — will not be simply a matter of changing the party affiliations of politicians in Tokyo. Ozawa spent the 1990s trying to build a second major party in Tokyo and failed. Masuzoe will have to build a movement from the ground up, recruiting new candidates (preferably ones who are not hereditary politicians), crafting new policies that critique the DPJ's approach to public problems while offer constructive proposals, and genuinely starting a new style of politics. The DPJ itself is trapped between a new style of politics and the old way of politics, as Hatoyama's and Ozawa's scandals suggest. The DPJ's campaign over the summer pointed the way to a new, less personalistic style of politics in which political parties build and maintain national brands and in which national party leaders are capable of disciplining backbenchers and keeping them on message.

The biggest problem for Masuzoe may be policy. In the past I've referred to his way of thinking as "humane reformism." A critic of Koizumi Junichiro's populism, Masuzoe has, like the DPJ, stressed a focus on improving health and welfare services. I have a hard time seeing how the ideas expressed here, for example, are different from the ideas of Nagatsuma Akira's, Masuzoe's successor as minister of health, labor, and welfare. Like other rich democracies, political competition in Japan is increasingly based on valence issues, issues that the public is nearly uniformly opposed to or in favor of, perhaps with the exception of foreign policy. On the issues of greatest concern to voters, the two parties have either already converged or will converge to a narrow range, leaving the parties to compete in terms on issues like corruption, leadership, and the ability to follow through on its proposals. If the DPJ's reforms of the policymaking process stick, this last issue will be crucial. The flip side of the DPJ's introduction of political leadership is that it will be harder to blame the bureaucrats.

Given these constraints, Masuzoe may be better off staying in the LDP, getting it to take his ideas seriously, develop an LDP brand that can challenge the DPJ's on the issues voters are most concerned about, and change how the LDP practices politics so that the LDP can have at least some credibility when it challenges the DPJ on corruption. He is right to look the DPJ, which succeeded in part because it was more top-down and less hereditary than the LDP.

The LDP chooses inertia

In the past week, three LDP members of the House of Councillors have bolted from the party, calling to mind among some LDP members, according to Asahi, the last time the LDP was in opposition (1993-1994). None of the three — Tottori's Tamura Kentaro, Ibaraki's Hasegawa Tamon, and Kagawa's Yamauchi Toshio — have decided to join with the DPJ: Yamauchi has indicated his desire to join the Kaikaku Kurabu (literally the Reform Club, but apparently translated as the Japan Renaissance Party), a micro-party with four upper house members that caucuses with the LDP, and the others will be independents, for now.

For the moment the DPJ is no closer to gaining a majority in the upper house before the election that will likely be held in July.

But the exit of these LDP UH members provides a glimpse into the LDP's struggles to change following its defeat in August.

Political parties, like all complex organizations embedded in fluctuating, unpredictable environments, must achieve some balance between change and inertia. Successful — and long-lived — parties may well be characterized by higher degrees of inertia, changing policies, organizational structure, or party rules only when some external shock requires adaptation. It may be the case, however, that the more successful a party is, the less able it is able to adapt when its external environment changes.

The LDP has been in an almost continuous state of crisis since the late 1980s, starting with the Recruit and Sagawa Kyubin scandals and the Ozawa rebellion that led to the LDP's going into opposition for the first time. Returning to power in 1994 did not dull the sense of crisis in the LDP. We cannot understand the rise of Koizumi Junichiro without appreciating the backdrop of crisis. But returning to power, even in cooperation with a series of coalition partners, strengthened the influence of inertial forces within the LDP even as the external circumstances (stagnant economy, changing demographics, the decline of the countryside, etc.) continued to evolve, demanding that the party change too. The battle between reformists and the old guard, which came to a head in the debate over postal privatization, reflects the competing forces present in all large organizations — and is not dissimilar from the experiences of other political parties.

Having failed to reform in power, the LDP has been given another opportunity to reform out of power. Judging by the departure of the three upper house members, who expressed their dissatisfaction with the party leadership's reform efforts when they notified the party of their decisions, the LDP is still struggling to change in significant ways. Masuzoe Yoichi, the former minister of health, labor, and welfare, has also criticized the party's leadership: in a speech last Tuesday Masuzoe said that the LDP needed a "dictatorial leader exceeding [the DPJ's] Mr. Ozawa." He said that if he were party leader, he would strengthen the party's hands in nominating candidates, bringing new candidates in and preventing them from running in their home districts (like the DPJ, Masuzoe is borrowing from British politics). He stressed that the party does not need to be resuscitated — it needs to be reborn.

New rules for selecting candidates, new leadership institutions, new procedures for choosing leaders, new policies, even a new name: these are the kinds of changes that we should expect political parties to consider in the aftermath of a considerable defeat. And these are precisely the kinds of changes that the LDP under Tanigaki Sadakazu has failed to undertake. Earlier this month, a party committee debated and ultimately rejected a proposal to change the LDP's name. More comprehensive reforms have not been forthcoming. Talk of killing the LDP's factions, which continue to linger on despite having lost much of their power, seems to have ceased. The party has introduced some changes into how it picks its leader: in the party election in September the party's prefectural chapters wielded more votes than in the past, but this change was more a matter of necessity due to the party's vastly reduced Diet caucus than a matter of conviction. Post-election talk of introducing a DPJ-style shadow cabinet that would centralize the party's policymaking functions went nowhere. In its most important functions the party president is no stronger now than before the LDP's defeat. And there are few signs that party has a plan for introducing the changes discussed by Masuzoe or other innovations derived from the DPJ's experience in opposition.

Why has the LDP thus far been so reluctant to change, or even to discuss change?

The LDP's reluctance to introduce institutional and policy changes may not be all that atypical. In fact, in keeping with the importance of inertia for parties and organizations, it may take a series of shocks rather than a single shock for a party to overcome its natural resistance to change. After all, embracing inertia — retrenchment, in a word — can be a rational strategy for a party recovering from a major shock, a means of limiting the extent of post-defeat chaos. Tanigaki's election as LDP president is an effect of this tendency, and has also served to deepen its roots within the party. While Tanigaki had a reputation as a liberal prior to his election, it seems that his devotion to the LDP establishment outweighs even his liberal tendencies. His actions since his election suggest that Tanigaki is a proponent of the old guard's thinking: he has silenced talk of radical reforms, spoken on behalf of the factions, and adopted a political strategy that prioritizes political expediency (calling for Hatoyama to resign immediately and a snap election) over the long-term survival of the LDP. Unlike Masuzoe's position, which stresses the importance of significant reforms as critical for the medium- and long-term survival of the LDP, Tanigaki's position seems to be that returning to power as soon as possible trumps party reform. In other words, had the LDP selected a different leader — Kono Taro, for example — it is likely that the LDP would be debating and embracing different policies than under Tanigaki.

Tanigaki's tendency to retrench rather than reform also reflects the balance of power within the LDP after the general election, which, as I noted the day after the election, is skewed towards older party members who have held numerous cabinet and party leadership posts. The composition of the LDP's members reinforces the power of inertia present in all large organizations.

As Masuzoe's speech last week suggests, leadership is critical — but as the aftermath of the Koizumi government suggests, it is not enough. Without control of the party leadership, the LDP's reformists waned once Koizumi left office. Reformists like Masuzoe will have to remake the party both in Tokyo and at the grassroots. They will have to fight to open the nominating process to new candidates, while at the same time working at party headquarters to centralize party governance much as Ozawa made the DPJ a far more centralized and disciplined party than it had been previously. But it may take more defeats in national and local elections before the reformists are able to build a durable coalition in favor of significant party change. Fortunately for the reformists, given that the LDP's support has remained abysmal even as the Hatoyama government's approval rating has fallen, more defeats (and defections) may be in the offing.

For the moment, however, there may be little the reformists can do other than float proposals for party change and work with party rank-and-file in the hope of building support for reform from the bottom up. Sooner or later, the DPJ will overreach and need another spell in opposition. I hope for Japan's sake that when it does overreach the LDP — or an LDP successor — is ready to govern. As of now, the LDP is still a long way from becoming that party.

Tanigaki as the compromise candidate

For the second time in three months, an effort by younger LDP members to lead the party in a different direction has run out of steam not long after getting started.

Ishihara Nobuteru (52), the last hope of the LDP's younger members, bowed out of the upcoming LDP presidential election on Saturday, clearing the way for Tanigaki Sadakazu (64), who has entered the race as the preferred candidate of the party's elders. Tanigaki will likely face Ishiba Shigeru and possibly Kono Taro (46), who has expressed interest in running and is undoubtedly a rising star in the party but is perhaps too young to assemble a winning coalition in time for this month's election. If the LDP is going to change, it won't be as the result of generational change within the party.

The LDP's "Rebirth Council," discussed here, has already backed away from harsh criticism of the factions and their leaders. If anything, the demographics favor the LDP's elders. 40% of the party's winners are over 60, the average age of the party's Diet members rose to 56.6, and Diet members who have won seven or more elections outnumber those who have won one to three elections 38 to 30, with the remaining 51 having won between four and six elections. In other words, too many leaders, not enough followers — and the leaders are not about to bow to the followers.

What of the prospects for party reform should Tanigaki win, and given the number of votes given to party chapters his victory is far from assured? Probably modest at best. The gist of Tanigaki's remarks is that he will try to please everyone as the party prepares for next year's upper house election: the young have a role to play, the factions should not be dissolved but should play a different role, and senior leaders should spend more time traveling the country speaking with voters. As Jun Okumura suggests, having the dovish Tanigaki as opposition leader might signal less of a policy departure than meets the eye: Amari Akira, a member of Aso's cabinet and one of the outgoing prime minister's lieutenants, said Friday that Tanigaki is the right man for the job. Yamamoto Ichita, one of the party's young reformists, would prefer a generational change but had nice things to say about Tanigaki's qualities as a politician.

Tanigaki would soften the party's image, but it seems unlikely that he would demand much or receive much in the way of internal reorganization. Tanigaki strikes me as the candidate of as little change as the party elders perceive as necessary for the LDP to retake power. By comparison, Ishiba is offering something more radical — he is not, for example, holding back from labeling the factions as outdated.

The LDP heads into the wilderness

With less than ten days until the start of the campaign for the LDP's presidency, the field is shrinking, not growing.

Nakagawa Hidenao, who in the immediate aftermath of the general election was convinced that his survival was fate and declared he would contest the election, will not be running in the race after all. His reasoning is that the LDP needs generational change — and it needs a post-factional leader who won a single-member district.

The LDP, however, seems more concerned about who its members should vote for on 16 September when the Diet will pick a new prime minister than who should be charged with the difficult task of remaking the LDP for opposition. Uesugi Takashi reviews the struggle to decide who to vote for for prime minister — initially some wanted to vote for Aso Taro, while others wanted to abstain — and concludes that while the revival of the LDP is "absolutely indispensable for democracy," it looks as if the LDP's revival is "receding into the distance." For the record, the LDP has agreed that it will vote for Wakabayashi Masatoshi, an upper house member who was Abe Shinzo's third and fifth MAFF ministers, as well as Fukuda Yasuo's first. Wakabayashi, it seems, is a man who can be counted on to be pressed into service by his party when it needs to fill a spot.

A group of younger LDP members — twenty-two members from both houses who have been elected seven times or less — calling itself the "Party Rebirth Council" met Wednesday to review the LDP's defeat and to consider how the party can recover. The council plans to have a report ready by the time the new leader is elected. As I have previously suggested, the council will recommend replacing the cumbersome policymaking system and other internal structures that ensured that the LDP itself was a more effective obstacle to policy change than the "opposition" parties. It is good that at least some LDP members are considering how the party needs to be changed, but the choice of leader will be essential, especially because, as Yamamoto Ichita writes, the new leader will presumably contest next year's upper house election, the Hatoyama government's first electoral test. Aso himself has called for unity as the party begins its struggle to return to power, but the LDP, never unified in the first place, will require a leader with the power to force others to obey. In a party with too many leaders and not enough followers — and too many members elected thanks to their name — the next leader will struggle to unify the party, even if the factions are dissolved. (Yamasaki Taku is the latest to call for the dissolution of the factions — seemingly impressive, as Yamasaki is a faction leader despite losing his seat last month, but less impressive considering Yamasaki's history of independent behavior.)

So as much as some younger members claim to desire a change of generation within the party, no one seems particularly willing to step forward into what will likely be an impossible job that could end quickly with a defeat next summer.

They ought to pick someone telegenic: if the DPJ succeeds in changing the policy process as planned, there will be little role for the LDP but to ask meddlesome questions in the Diet, criticize the government in the media, mind the party's internal organization, and wait for the DPJ to become exhausted, corrupt, and incapable of controlling cabinet ministers and backbenchers.

Finally, as a sign of how low the LDP has sunk, Sankei's Komori Yoshihisa has a long blog post in which he tears into the LDP for basically being inadequately conservative (although still better than the "dangerous" DPJ and its policies, which Komori wonders, may not deserve the name "policies"). These are the kind of pressures awaiting the LDP's next leader. Caught between the voters and an agitated conservative media and intelligentsia, between oppositionists and constructivists within the party, the next leader will be set up for failure. It may be a long time before we see a new LDP emerge.

The LDP's first steps towards a new party

A week after the Liberal Democratic Party suffered its first ever electoral defeat, a new party is already taking shape from the ashes.

The biggest change, of course, is the final demise of the factions as a force within the party. As Koike Yuriko said earlier this week upon announcing her departure from the Machimura faction, "The age of the factions is over."

Having already given way to ideological groupings before the election, it is increasingly likely that LDP members will associate more with others sharing their ideas instead of joining factions. Nakagawa Hidenao, an important player in this transition before the election who called for the dissolution of the factions earlier this week, has announced that he will call a meeting of reformists — including Shiozaki Yasuhisa, former chief cabinet secretary — on Monday.

Yamauchi Koichi, a former LDP member who won a PR seat this year for Watanabe Yoshimi's Your Party, has some thoughts about ideological groups within the LDP. One, he says, is the "pure conservative" group of hawks clustered around Aso Taro and Abe Shinzo, about which he says that in their focus upon ideological conflict with the left wing — symbolized by their hatred for Nikkyoso — they will have a difficult time broadening the party's popularity. Another group, led, he says, would be a "liberal" group. Led by Tanigaki Sadakazu, it would resemble the DPJ, with a focus on regions and the creation of a "twentieth-century-style" welfare state. (I'm not quite sure what he means by the label twentieth-century-style.) The third, led by Nakagawa and Shiozaki, is a neo-liberal group, emphasizing small government, administrative reform, economic growth, and free markets. Yamauchi makes clear that he approves of the third as providing the best contrast with the DPJ, which he caricatures as a pork-barreling, big government and twentieth-century-style welfare state-supporting, anti-market, anti-American, anti-globalization political party.

Whatever one thinks as Yamauchi's ideas about which path the LDP should take, his classification scheme is useful. In the forthcoming party election, LDP members will pick one of these courses.

The least coherent is Yamauchi's second group, the "liberal" group. Revealingly, Tanigaki's candidacy for the LDP presidency has the backing of Mori Yoshiro, whose power within the party may have been enhanced by his having narrowly won his single-member district last week — even though Tanigaki does not yet have the support of his own faction, the Koga faction. That Mori would indicate his support for a candidate not from his Machimura faction is a sign of that the power of factions is weakening, but it also suggests that the liberal group is not quite liberal — rather it is the "change as little as possible" group. What, after all, is Mori's ideology? Under the leadership of this group, the LDP's ideological identity would be blurry. While the other two choices would pursue a course of opposing the DPJ at every turn, drawing sharp distinctions between the LDP and the DPJ, the middle group would be a bit more "constructive," answering the government's plans with drafts of its own, perhaps using foreign policy as the issue to separate the two parties.

In short, the LDP's debates are going to resemble the DPJ's debates over the past decade. Should the LDP be "constructivist" or "oppositionist?" The problem for the LDP is that the "oppositionist" line preferred by the conservatives and neo-liberals concedes considerable ground to the DPJ in policy terms, because it means focusing on issues that are less important to the Japanese public than the issues stressed by the DPJ. But this may be a temporary problem.

If the DPJ is successful in power, the oppositionists will be eventually forced to adapt or will be eliminated as the LDP struggles to return to power. Much as the Labour Party became New Labour and the Conservatives have become New Labour-Lite under David Cameron, so the LDP will be forced to become a new LDP that both accepts the changes introduced by a DPJ government and finds a way to critique the DPJ for the inevitable policy failures and corruption scandal that will emerge the longer the party stays in power.

But for now, the oppositionist approach may be the most satisfying as the party tries to reorganize after defeat. I expect that LDP members may be tempted to support a strict oppositionist candidate in this month's presidential election, which would be a natural continuation of the demonization of the DPJ that was central to the party's general election campaign strategy. Will Ishiba Shigeru, a policy wonk trying to position himself as the front runner in the race to replace Aso, be able to tap into the vein of resentment against the DPJ present in large portions of the party?

Ishiba doesn't fit comfortably in any of the aforementioned ideological veins. He is best known as a hawk and a self-described "defense otaku," but he is a defense policy wonk; his hawkishness differs from the cultural hawkishness of Abe and Aso, who view a strong defense more as a cultural imperative than as a "mere" policy matter. He is not particularly well-connected to the neo-liberal group, but he is not particularly traditionalist either. In short, he may be the perfect leader to revive the LDP — if not today, then eventually. He may have a hard time assembling the necessary votes this time around.

Who will lead the LDP?

Masuzoe Yoichi, the upper house member who I recently listed as the obvious front runner in the race to replace Aso Taro as LDP president, said Wednesday that he would not seek the position.

Masuzoe cited his responsibility as a member of the ruling cabinet for the party's defeat as his reason for not seeking the position — although Jiji suggests that Masuzoe's candidacy faced opposition from within the party, not surprisingly given that Masuzoe has been stubbornly independent even as an LDP member. (Incidentally, it is worth recalling as Masuzoe prepares to leave office that he actually managed to serve in the same post from the reshuffled Abe cabinet in August 2007 — which he joined after criticizing the prime minister following the upper house election defeat — until the present, a remarkable run considering the circumstances.)

Masuzoe was joined by Koike Yuriko in bowing out from the race: the former defense minister said Wednesday that she would not seek the post for the second year in a row, citing her weakened status as a "zombie" politician, in the Diet only by virtue of proportional representation after losing her seat.

Ishihara Nobuteru, another potential front runner, remains noncommittal about running in the race.

For those who ultimately decide to run, it will be a harder race — and harder to ascertain the outcome in advance. To compensate for the dramatic decline in the number of LDP Diet members, the LDP will give its prefectural chapters 300 votes in the election. The chapters will each receive a minimum of three votes, with the remaining 159 votes distributed proportionally on the basis of the number of votes in a chapter. Combined with the 200 votes of Diet members, 500 votes will determine the next LDP president.

Between the decline of the factions and the tremendous power that will be wielded by the prefectural chapters, the outcome will be difficult to predict. But given the manner in which the prefectural votes will be distributed, the race could be won by a candidate popular in urban areas capable of getting (presumably discouraged) party members in populous prefectures out to vote in large numbers.

It appears as if we are witnessing the birth pangs of a new LDP. Nakagawa Hidenao, renewing his fight to make a new LDP, writes that the first step to the LDP's rebirth is the dissolution of the factions. Whether or not they are officially dissolved, the age of factional politics appears at an end. Instead we will be witnessing a renewed period of ideological conflict within the LDP, conflict that will often fall along geographical lines. As a member of the former Tanigaki faction now in the Koga faction said, since Koizumi's bid to make the LDP an urban party destroyed the party's provincial base, the next LDP leader ought not to come from an urban district. It seems to me that this kind of thinking assumes that it is possible to resurrect the "conservative kingdoms," if only the LDP reorients itself to a rural base, ignoring the mounting evidence that in the present age floating voters are everywhere — and that Komeito has become an indispensable LDP support group, which happens to be closer to the DPJ in policy terms, is in even worse straits than the LDP after its entire leadership went down to absolute defeat Sunday thanks to the decision not to run simultaneously for PR seats, and is publicly reconsidering the nature of its partnership with the LDP.

It seems that perhaps the most essential quality for the LDP's next leader is the ability and willingness to work closely with Komeito on a new path to power, lest the party forfeit even more support than it already has.

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.

Fleeing a sinking ship?

A week after Nagasaki Kotaro — and his 3600 supporters in Yamanashi's second district — left the LDP, another Koizumi child has bolted the party.

Yamauchi Koichi, a first termer representing Kanagawa's ninth district, had, as discussed in this post, come to recognize the unpleasant situation for reformists in the post-Koizumi LDP. As he said in this post announcing his departure from the LDP, "The current LDP is like a different party from the 'Koizumi LDP' of the general election in 2005." He rejects the backsliding since 2005, and would rather campaign on his own than violate his principles. (Yamamoto Ichita describes Yamauchi, a member of his reform study group, as having a "pure heart.")

In short, Yamauchi may simply have uncommon courage for an LDP politician. He will face a particularly tough reelection fight: the DPJ candidate is Ryu Hirofumi, the incumbent who lost to Yamauchi in 2005 86,673 votes to 82,878 and was resurrected through proportional representation. And that's without considering the possibility that the LDP might send an "assassin" against Yamauchi.

As expected, there appears to be no plan in the works for a large-scale exodus of reformists from the LDP. Instead, it seems that following Tuesday's self-criticism session, the reformists have made a temporary peace with Aso Taro, perhaps following Nakagawa Hidenao's message that the DPJ must be stopped.

In other words, Yamauchi may not be the last reformist to leave the LDP before the general election, but he will most likely not have much company in exile. For many reformists, it seems that likely defeat with the help of LDP resources is preferable to near-certain defeat alone.

Aso gets his election

As planned, Prime Minister Aso Taro dissolved Japan's House of Representatives Tuesday afternoon.

Despite criticism from members of the cabinet last week, all signed the cabinet decision for dissolution. Before dissolving, Aso attended a meeting with LDP Diet members, humbly accepted their criticism, and then proceeded to dissolve the lower house.

The campaign will officially begin in twenty-seven days, on 18 August, but in the meantime the tasks for the LDP and the DPJ are clear.

Above all, the LDP has to unify: after a brutal and ultimately futile feud between Aso and his supporters, and the party's reformist camp, the LDP has to unite behind a single manifesto and behind Aso's leadership. The LDP's infighting has made it remarkably easy for the DPJ to argue that the LDP is incapable of governing Japan. The more the LDP fights with itself, the harder it is for the party to claim that the DPJ cannot be trusted with power. This will, of course, be the party's central message in the campaign (see this discussion at Mutantfrog of a new LDP Internet ad).

The DPJ, while it goes into the campaign season with a sizable lead in public opinion polls, cannot rest on its laurels. Needing to pick up an extraordinarily difficult 129 seats to secure a majority in its own right, the DPJ must not assume that the general election is already won. The LDP is still a potent adversary, especially if Tuesday marks the beginning of a genuine truce in the LDP's ranks. Accordingly, the DPJ's leadership recognizes that the party must not be overly optimistic as its candidates go out on the hustings.

As has long been clear, the contest over the next month is simple. Which narrative will win? Will the DPJ be able to make the general election a referendum not just on the past year of Aso rule, not just the past four years of LDP rule but on the LDP system of government more generally? Or will the LDP succeed in making this election about the dangers of abandoning the LDP for the DPJ's cloud cuckoo land?

Aso will fight on

The anti-Asō rebellion was over before it even began.

Instead of a meeting of LDP Diet members that would meet today and debate whether to hold a party presidential election before a general election — thereby undoing the prime minister's plan for a 21 July dissolution — the LDP executive agreed to an informal, closed gathering of Diet members that will meet for two hours before the House of Representatives is dissolved on Tuesday. The party leaders claimed that Nakagawa Hidenao's petition fell short of the necessary 128 signatures to force a general meeting. Asō Tarō will attend, to "listen" to the opinions of LDP members. Presumably he will be apologetic for the party's electoral defeats and promise to try harder in the coming weeks, giving the meeting the air of a self-criticism session. (Hence its being held behind closed doors, as suggested by Yamamoto Ichita.) Then he will walk from LDP headquarters down the street to the Kokkai — a victory strut of sorts? — and dissolve the lower house as planned.

The opposition has not folded entirely, but it has been deflated considerably. After urging the prime minister to resign, Yosano Kaoru, the finance minister, declared that he is satisfied with the decision to convene an informal meeting. Ishiba Shigeru, the agriculture minister, similarly voiced his support for the prime minister, and like Yosano argued that the meeting will be an important first step for the party to unite under Asō.

The leaders of the movement now have to decide what to do next. Do they leave the party? Form a new party? Genuflect before Asō and the party leadership and promise to campaign hard for the LDP? Develop a separate manifesto while remaining under the LDP banner? Hatoyama Kunio, after having been unceremoniously dumped from the cabinet by the prime minister he had long stood by, now rivals Nakagawa as the prime minister's fiercest critic. At a press conference Friday, he spoke of forming an independent "group" within the LDP and said he would gladly form a new party if ordered to leave. (In other words: "You can't throw me out, I quit!")

Meanwhile, Nakagawa tried to resubmit the petition Friday but was rejected — and then disparaged the party's "compromise" as the worst possible outcome. He has given no hint to his plans. Kato Koichi, who in recent weeks emerged as a key Nakagawa ally, appears to have let Nakagawa do the talking, but I suspect that Kato is not long for the party anyway.

Takebe Tsutomu, no less outspoken in his opposition to the government, was explicitly told to leave the party by Oshima Tadamori.

Watanabe Yoshimi is eagerly waiting to welcome LDP exiles to his yet-to-be-named party, which is set to be born after the Diet is dissolved. Watanabe has reportedly been in discussions with Hatoyama Kunio and Hiranuma Takeo, the latter of whom is in the process of creating his long-discussed conservative party. An alliance is not necessarily in the works, although were the two to link up, it would basically result in an Abe-ist party. After watching the opposition to Asō fold over recent days, however, it is hard to see how many LDP members will leave to join either Watanabe or Hiranuma. Some might — Takebe, for example — but few seem to have the fortitude showed by Nagasaki Kotaro, who upped and left at the start of this week. It seems that candidates concerned about running under Asō's leadership will simply do the best they can to distance themselves from the prime minister without leaving the party.

As for Nakagawa, it is appropriate that onetime rebel Kato ("the ghost of rebellions past") became Nakagawa's ally in his fight against Asō, because Kato's present may be Nakagawa's future. Nakagawa has spent so much energy on trying to change the LDP and seems incapable of leaving the party. It's possible that he will remain in the party, isolated, another man who could have been king (or at least could have taken down the king).

And in the meantime, the LDP marches to what looks like certain defeat under its battered leader.

SNAFU

Is the Nakagawa rebellion fizzling out already?

After loudly proclaiming that he had received enough signatures to force a meeting of LDP Diet members within in the next week, it turns out that Nakagawa Hidenao's campaign to unseat Asō Tarō is falling victim to the pusillanimity of his "supporters."

Some of the 133 signatories have claimed that they did not sign in the hope of unseating the prime minister but merely in the hope that it would force Asō to reflect on the party's defeats in local elections and resolve to work harder in advance of the general election. It seems that members of the Tsushima and Koga factions in particular are looking to remove their signatures from the petition. (Yamamoto Ichita has more on this here.)

What a sorry excuse for a rebellion, and a testament to Nakagawa's deficiencies as leader of the LDP's reformist anti-mainstream.

The LDP in ruins

On Wednesday, Nakagawa Hidenao announced that the movement to move up the LDP presidential election from September — in effect a campaign for a recall election aimed at Prime Minister Asō Tarō — reached its goal of signatures from more than one-third of LDP members in the upper and lower houses (one-third is 128 members). Among the 133 signatures received are those of two members of the Asō cabinet, Yosano Kaoru, the finance minister, and Ishiba Shigeru, the agriculture minister.

The rebels are urging the LDP executive to convene a general meeting of LDP members from both houses — and with Asō determined to dissolve the Diet Tuesday, they are running out of time.

Having one-third of the Diet caucus is sufficient to force a general meeting, but whether they will be able to secure a majority of Diet members plus the heads of the forty-seven prefectural chapters remains to be seen. But that said, this group includes more than just the Koizumi children, although they are certainly in the mix. There are enough signatories with cabinet experience and longevity that Asō and his allies cannot simply ignore them. (The complete list is available here.) There is certainly a reformist "color" to the list, but it is not necessarily a group of Nakagawa's compatriots. I would imagine a number of the signatories are there because they simply fear for the future of the party, not because they accept Nakagawa's ideological program. In other words, this group is not the beginning of a new reformist party.

This group, and Nakagawa in particular, is convinced that the LDP can be saved by throwing Asō overboard, indeed that the prime minister is the only thing standing in the way of LDP victory. As I argued here, I think Nakagawa's position assigns far too much blame to Asō for what is essentially a structural problem in the LDP. After going through three prime ministers in three years, it is hard to believe that the problem is simply having the wrong people at the head of the party. After watching the LDP's members war with one another simply to remove Asō, will the public be convinced that the LDP is a whole new party? If the party manages to unseat the prime minister and elevate, for example, Masuzoe Yoichi in his place, will the party instantly become more manageable? (Motegi Toshimitsu, a former administrative reform minister, and Sugawara Isshu, the LDP's deputy secretary general, met with Masuzoe Wednesday evening to urge him to run in the event that Asō falls from power.) Masuzoe's position would be particularly difficult given that he would be the first postwar prime minister from the upper house and has always prided himself on being independent from party (great as a crusading minister, bad in a party leader). He might be able to save the LDP in a general election, but when it came to governing he would presumably get ensnared by the same problems that have undermined previous LDP prime ministers.

At this juncture, however, Yosano has emerged as a key figure in determining not only whether Asō will survive, but also whether the prime minister will be able to go forward with a dissolution and general election as planned. Yomiuri reports that the finance minister met with the prime minister for forty minutes on Wednesday and urged him to resign voluntarily. Yosano also hinted that he might not sign the declaration dissolving the House of Representatives and stressed that the party leaders must listen to dissenting voices in determining how to proceed. Despite his long-running battle with Nakagawa — the war of Nakagawa's "rising tide" school versus Yosano's "fiscal reconstructionists" — Yosano is now a critical ally for Nakagawa inside the cabinet, seeing as how the reformists do not have one of their own in the government. But even Yosano cannot stop the dissolution, as the prime minister can dismiss him and assume his position if Yosano refuses to sign the order.

The battle is building to a climax. There will presumably be a meeting of LDP Diet members, if only to vote down the proposal. That would probably be the best outcome for Asō, given that he probably has the votes. Mori Yoshiro spoke of making a decision about a "recall" election on the basis of the opinion of all members, a reminder that two-thirds of the party's members did not sign the petition. And Asō has the upper hand, in that he only has to hold out until Tuesday and then he can dissolve the Diet, even if he has to dismiss members of his cabinet to do so.

On Thursday, Takebe Tsutomu likened the current situation to the bakumatsu, the end of the Tokugawa shogunate in the 1850s and 1860s. He may be right, but he should remember that it takes more than one group to produce political chaos. The Asō cabinet may be tottering and feeble, but the reaction it has engendered from within the LDP has mortally wounded the government, worsening the conditions that inspired the reaction in the first place. If the rebels fail — and it looks like they will, because Asō is nothing if not stubborn — they will have guaranteed the outcome they sought to avoid: the disastrous defeat of the LDP and the formation of a DPJ government.