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.

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 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 budget is the key to regime change

In their final appeals to Japanese voters, Kan Naoto and other DPJ leaders laid particular stress on the budget.

Speaking in Tokyo on Saturday, Kan said, "True regime change is politicians who have received the trust of the people restoring the right to formulate budgets to the people." Okada Katsuya, the DPJ's secretary-general, delivered the same message in Gifu Saturday. "We will completely review and remake the budget," he said. "We will review from a zero base that severs existing obligations."

Perhaps it seems strange that on the eve of the general election that may deliver the DPJ into power for the first time, its leaders are speaking of the "right of formulating budgets" and "zero-based budgeting."

It shouldn't. After all, the power to determine how a nation's wealth is spent and distributed — inherent in the national budget — has been at the center of political conflicts for centuries since the rise of the modern state. Appropriately considering that Kan and other DPJ politicians are looking to create a proper Westminster system on Japan's shores, the battle over the budget was particularly central to Britain's political development, from the struggles of the seventeenth century, Britain's "century of revolution," to the battle over the "People's Budget" roughly a century ago, when the Asquith government fought over the House of Lords over a budget that included redistributory measures, especially pensions, and would be financed by tax increases on the wealthy.

When Kan speaks of the right to formulate budgets, he is speaking of something fundamental to democracy: that the people's representatives should have the power to decide how the public's money is spent and that their decisions should be transparent so that the people can decide whether they approve of how their representatives are using the public's wealth. The problem is not that politicians have been uninvolved in budgeting under LDP rule, but that their involvement was the product of collusion between elected representatives and bureaucrats who saw cooperation with certain politicians — the LDP's zoku giin (policy tribesmen) — making deals behind closed doors to benefit particular groups and constituents at the expense of the whole. The opacity of the budgeting process was compounded by the existence of special accounts in addition to the general budget, funds that were used with little or no public oversight. It was for this reason that when I spoke with one of the DPJ's rising stars, a retired finance ministry official, in January he stressed that the DPJ cannot be sure of how it will pay for all of its promises because it cannot be sure of how much money is sitting in special accounts the contents of which have not been made available to the DPJ, let alone the public at large.

Accordingly, while some doubt that anything will change with a DPJ victory, if the DPJ succeeds at making the budgeting process even more top-down and subject to political control than it became as a result of the Hashimoto reforms of the late 1990s (the extent to which these reforms transformed the budgeting process are open for debate), it will have truly changed Japan. Restoring the cabinet's constitutional prerogative to formulate the budget is, after all, the goal of the party's plans for a national strategy office. Administrative reform has arguably been one of the DPJ's core principles since the first DPJ was created in 1996 — the above statements and others reveal that for the DPJ administrative reform that does not include reform of the budgeting process is incomplete.

Changing the budgeting process, often construed as entailing a fight with the ministry of finance, may in fact entail more significant battles with the ministries responsible for spending the money rather than the ministry allocating it. Under LDP rule, spending ministries like the agriculture ministry, the former construction ministry, and the health, labor, and welfare ministry have been the primary administrative beneficiaries of opaque budgeting — it was not accidental that the most powerful policy tribes were connected to these policy areas. All of these ministries have suffered from budget cuts over the past decade, which will presumably make them even more resistant to changes proposed by the DPJ: it is their budgets that the DPJ would like to redirect in order to pay for programs directed at the public's main concerns.

Cutting these budgets will take a certain ruthlessness on the part of a DPJ government. Naturally the LDP will find ways to put a human face on budget cuts. Presumably manga artist Satonaka Machiko's appeal on behalf of the 11.7 billion yen "national media arts center" lampooned as Aso Taro's "Manga cafe" by the DPJ will not be the last such appeal if the DPJ wins Sunday. Masuzoe Yoichi, Aso's minister of health, labor, and welfare and potentially Aso's successor as LDP leader, warned that the DPJ's policy of rearranging the budget could jeopardize important programs in his ministry to combat swine flu and unemployment, which strikes me as fearmongering on Masuzoe's part, but it does suggest that after an electoral defeat the LDP will still find ways to challenge the DPJ on this question of remaking the budget.

But ultimately giving politicians in the cabinet more power over the budget is but a first step to moving Japan in a new direction. Having claimed budgetary authority, the government will then have to find a way to balance among the DPJ's three goals of fixing Japan's finances, building a proper social safety net, and finding a way to get Japanese households and companies channeling their cash holdings into profitable investment and consumption.

In most areas the DPJ may not signal a radical departure from the LDP — most areas except for the question of who should make Japan's budgets. And it is that difference which makes all the difference. If the DPJ implements its plans for a strengthened cabinet, it will make a radical departure from LDP rule, and clear the way for further policy changes.

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.

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.

Circling the drain

The dissolution of the House of Representatives, Prime Minister Asō Tarō tells us, is not far off.

It cannot come soon enough. Each day brings more news of Asō's loosening grasp on his own party. Yomiuri reports that from Monday, the effort to replace the prime minister will take on a new urgency. The movement to move up the LDP presidential election is growing apace, becoming the latest cause of the LDP's reformists, who seem to think that one final change of leadership will be able to make up for three years of backsliding on reform. In addition to Yamamoto Taku, the lower house member circulating a petition on the election, Takebe Tsutomu, onetime Koizumi lieutenant, is also calling for an early party election, suggesting that Koike Yuriko or Masuzoe Yoichi would make fine choices for a new party leader and prime minister. Nakagawa Hidenao has suggested that if Asō does the "honorable" thing and resigns, LDP rule can continue. Tanahashi Yasufumi, who as a forty-one-year-old third-term Diet member became a cabinet minister holding special portfolios for science and technology and food safety under Koizumi, has openly called for the prime minister's resignation.

It is difficult to see what this campaign against Asō will accomplish other than accelerating the LDP's decline and perhaps forcing Asō into accelerating the lower house dissolution and a general election. The prime minister, after all, still has a nuclear option in the form of the right of dissolution, and to use it would deal a mortal blow to efforts to unseat him. If it would be farcical to replace Asō now, on the eve of a dissolution, it would be even more insulting to the intelligence of the Japanese public to replace Asō once the clock started ticking from the dissolution to a general election. To change leaders now would be an insult, sending a simple message to the public: pay no attention to the mishaps of the three LDP leaders who followed Koizumi and look to the bright future under (insert name of flashy new leader here).

At this point it would be no less insulting for Asō to reshuffle the LDP leadership to change the faces who will be seen on the campaign trail along with the prime minister. But along with his power over the timing of the general election the power to pick his cabinet and party leaders is just about all that Asō has left, and so it seems possible that he will use this last remaining tool to shake up the LDP. Yamamoto Ichita alludes to rumors that the PM might name Masuzoe chief cabinet secretary — in other words, giving Masuzoe responsibility for the election campaign, which would ensure that one of the few remaining popular LDP members would go before the public across the country.

Nevertheless, it is getting difficult to think of new metaphors and similes to illustrate just how desperate the LDP's situation is as June comes to a close. It is difficult to see a pathway to victory for the LDP barring some enormous scandal that implicates much of the DPJ — and even then, the election would presumably be closely contested. For all their good intentions, the reformists appear to have ensured that the LDP will be stuck with Asō, who now, thanks to their campaign to remove him, looks largely powerless as prime minister and party leader.

But not wholly powerless, as it looks like he will exercise his ultimate power. Asō has met with LDP and Komeitō leaders in recent days, and Sankei suggests that an early August election is most likely. According to Oshima Tadamori, the LDP's kokutai chairman, Asō has a final choice to make: whether to dissolve the Diet before he goes to Italy for the G8 summit on July 8 (and before the Tokyo assembly election on July 12) or whether to wait until after the Tokyo election. The choice will make little difference for the outcome – although Asō may enjoy Italy more if he waits until after his return to dissolve the Diet and call an election.

Aso in a tailspin

Prime Minister Aso Taro is in Peru for this year's APEC summit, a summit that will undoubtedly be an even greater exercise in futility than usual.

At home, his administration is faltering.

He is under fire from within the LDP for recent gaffes. (It was only a matter of time before Mr. Aso talked without thinking.) The most politically costly gaffe may prove to be his remark that many doctors lack "common sense." Masuzoe Yoichi, the health, labor, and welfare minister, admonished his prime minister to stay on message, as he has struggled to make the case for the LDP's efforts to fix medical care for the elderly. Mr. Masuzoe is not alone in criticizing the prime minister. Oshima Tadamori, the LDP's Diet strategy chairman, cautioned the prime minister to "be careful with his words." More significantly, Karasawa Yoshihito, the chairman of the Japan Medical Association, called upon Mr. Aso to take back his remark and apologize. Chairman Karasawa's remarks are indicative of a growing rift between the LDP and the JMA, a longtime supporter of the LDP. While the JMA may no longer wield the clout it once did — as Gerald Curtis noted — the JMA can damage the LDP simply by making a public show of breaking with the ruling party. The Ibaraki prefectural medical association has already announced that it will endorse DPJ candidates in the next general election to protest the new eldercare system. How many more will follow Ibaraki's lead after Mr. Aso's remarks?

More significantly, Mr. Aso may be facing a wider rebellion within the LDP on matters of policy. The prime minister told a press gaggle earlier this week that he is considering a plan that will freeze the privatization of Japan Post. It did not take long for the LDP's remaining reformers to recoil in horror. Nakagawa Hidenao, de facto leader of the Koizumians, swore that the prime minister must not be allowed to reverse course on postal privatization. Yamamoto Ichita responded with an angry post at his blog, promising that he (and presumably his fellow reformers) would not remain silent. Mr. Yamamoto noted that if Mr. Aso were to proceed with a freeze, it would be a direct repudiation of the supermajority upon which his government is based, seeing as how the 2005 general election was contested on the very question of postal privatization. I'm not certain that the public is as enamored with postal privatization now that Mr. Koizumi's spell has been broken. But the symbolic effect of reversing course on postal privatization would be unmistakable: it would illustrate clearly that the Japanese people have been the victim of a classic bait-and-switch in the three years since the last general election, voting for a party that promised reform without sanctuary only to be ruled by governments interested in fortifying the walls of existing sanctuaries.

Finally, a group of twenty-four young LDP reformers led by former Chief Cabinet Secretary Shiozaki Yasuhisa and administrative reformer minister Watanabe Yoshimi has appealed to the government for the passage of the second stimulus package during the current Diet session, echoing similar calls from the DPJ. The group called for the government to lead effectively in the face of the crisis. Kawamura Takeo, chief cabinet secretary, responded by saying that the government is reluctant to act because it cannot trust the DPJ to cooperate on the stimulus, thus illustrating the young Turks' point. What's the point of having a supermajority if it cannot be wielded decisively in response to a crisis? (Of course, I'm skeptical about the value of the stimulus package — this article has me convinced.) In any case, both Yomiuri and Sankei speculate whether the new group is the beginning of an anti-Aso group.

Clearly Mr. Aso's landslide victory in September did not spell the end to the LDP's civil war. The LDP is no less divided over its future, and despite being marginalized by Mr. Aso, the reformists are still capable of stirring up trouble for the prime minister. Mr. Aso appears to have little control over his party or the agenda. His government seems reduced to searching for new ways to rally support for the government rather than finding new policies or implementing old ones. MTC describes this as Mr. Aso's "lightness." I agree wholeheartedly. Mr. Aso sold himself as the agent of an aggressive reform conservatism that would reinvigorate the LDP and make the case to the public that under his leadership the LDP can be trusted to fix the problems created by Mr. Aso's LDP predecessors. But it seems that, as MTC suggests, Mr. Aso is little more than the exhorter-in-chief, long on pep talks for the Japanese people, short on policies that will make the least bit of difference in rescuing his faltering country.

And now the LDP is stuck with him, at least until the prime minister decides to call (or is forced to call) a general election.

In the meantime, we will be treated to the spectacle of yet another prime minister's approval ratings take a nosedive.

Fukuda the pressured

Watching the news this morning, I saw Fukuda Yasuo's remarks yesterday on whether he intends to reshuffle his cabinet in advance of the autumn extraordinary session of the Diet.

As before, he stated that he has not made his decision yet, that he is considering the "whole situation" in regard to conditions within the LDP and the policy agenda for the forthcoming session. He repeated that he will make his decision on a reshuffle by 29 July, incidentally the first anniversary of the LDP's historic defeat in the 2007 upper house election.

Ibuki Bunmei, speaking in Osaka, confirmed that the prime minister has yet to decide on a course of action.

The look on Mr. Fukuda's face was grim, almost pained, and his speech was strained.

In short, it looked and sounded to me like he had made up his mind on a reshuffle: he doesn't want to do it.

However, it seems that he is being forced to make a show of considering it and may even be pressured into going through with a reshuffle, thanks to pressure from within the LDP (channeled through a pliant political press). That seems to be all there is to the idea of a reshuffle: leaks to the media from certain members of the party and government who desire a reshuffle in the hope of hounding the prime minister into deciding in their favor.

As noted previously, it's not even clear what a Fukuda-colored cabinet will look like. Yamamoto Ichita provided one answer to this question: "Blue."

Asked to explain what the Fukuda "color" following a luncheon meeting of the Machimura faction by a reporter, Mr. Yamamoto answered that it is difficult to say just what Mr. Fukuda stands for, what qualities a Fukuda-colored cabinet would possess.

Masuzoe Yoichi, minister for health, labor, and welfare, made the case on TV Thursday for his staying in his post (i.e., that he is appropriately Fukuda-colored), describing his leaving the ministry after less than a year as "idiotic."

Mr. Masuzoe's comment gets to the heart of the matter. If Mr. Fukuda is forced to reshuffle his cabinet, the third cabinet within the past year, it will be yet another sign of the LDP's reverting into the hands of its risk-averse elders — and yet another sign of the LDP's unsuitability as the vehicle for fixing the mess that it has created.

It's time that Mr. Fukuda followed Koizumi Junichiro's advice and made a decision, preferably a decision not to reshuffle, thereby reasserting his authority (for the time being anyway).

Fukuda falls, Masuzoe rises

Sankei has published an article breaking down the factors in the Fukuda cabinet's falling poll numbers — and notes an interesting finding.

Among the people who replied to the question asking them to evaluate Masuzoe Yoichi, minister of health and welfare, 72% replied favorably, making him the highest rated among eleven Diet members included in the poll. By comparison, Mr. Koizumi, now back in the public spotlight, received a 57% favorable rating, Aso Taro received a 52.9% favorable rating, Hatoyama Kunio received a 16.7% favorable rating (and a 68.8% unfavorable rating), Ishiba Shigeru received a 43.1% favorable rating (and a 40.8% unfavorable rating), and Ozawa Ichiro received a 26.5% favorable rating (and a 58.2% unfavorable rating).

In other words, Mr. Masuzoe may be the only member of the Fukuda cabinet to emerge from this government with his public standing enhanced.

I can't say that I'm surprised by this finding, but it does serve as an indictment of Mr. Fukuda. At the start of his cabinet, there were hopes that Mr. Fukuda's agenda would be consistent with Mr. Masuzoe's "humane reformism" — particularly concerning the Japanese bureaucracy. In the 100+ days since Mr. Fukuda took office, however, he has backpedaled, backing away from commitments to, well, just about any course of action.

The support for Mr. Masuzoe also suggests something about how the Japanese public thinks about reform. I suspect that Mr. Masuzoe's persistent criticism of the bureaucracy and its privileges wins him points. Beyond that, I think Mr. Masuzoe's kinder, gentler reformism, focused on improving the health care and welfare systems, is more appealing to the general public than Mr. Koizumi's strident reformism (just look at Mr. Koizumi's language: "destroy," "opposition forces," etc.) He offers a way forward for the LDP — a way forward that the LDP is incapable of embracing.

One more month

As anticipated, the Fukuda cabinet has decided to extend the extraordinary (and extraordinarily long) Diet session thirty-one days, to 15 January, ensuring that the sixty-day rule will take effect and allow the House of Representatives to pass the new anti-terror special measures law.

As noted by MTC, the extension means that the Diet will recess for two days — when the LDP and the DPJ will hold their national conventions — before reconvening for the regular session of the Diet on 18 January.

Has the government, as suggested by Komeito, "crossed the Rubicon?"

It may look that way, especially since the decision to extend the Diet session — in effect a demonstration of the government's resolve to do whatever it takes to pass its bill — has coincided with the reemergence of the pensions scandal at the forefront of the national discussion. Mr. Fukuda has acted quickly in an attempt to soften the blow — in this week's mail magazine, he wrote, "As the representative of the Government, I offer my apologies to the people for the misconduct that has gone on for many years" — but his public support will probably drop some more, and, as suggested by Jun Okumura, Masuzoe Yoichi may be forced to offer up his head, an unfortunate consequence for the government.

Is this the beginning of a death spiral that will result in a dissolution, a general election, and possibly a change of ruling party? As reported by Mainichi, Komeito is evidently not convinced that the government will be able to avoid a snap election. And, of course, the LDP has given the DPJ yet another gift that will allow it to remain on the offensive against the government.

But I still think that should the Upper House pass a censure motion against the government in response to the re-passage of the anti-terror law in the House of Representatives, Mr. Fukuda will be able to ignore it and carry on with governing, at least for the time being.

It is interesting to see the approach that the prime minister has taken in response to the new pensions scandal. Aside from wasting no time in apologizing to the Japanese people, he has also wasted no time in making clear that the issue is the bureaucracy and its failings:

It turns out that in numerous cases these unidentified records involve rudimentary mistakes, including typos and record transfer errors, on the part of the Social Insurance Agency. The further we advance in our investigations, the more it has become apparent just how slipshod work had been at the Social Insurance Agency. Each and every one of the pension records is directly connected to the livelihood of a person. Nevertheless, the Social Insurance Agency failed to act in a manner consistent with this basic fact, which I find to be truly regrettable.

Is Mr. Fukuda able to take this approach — which Mr. Abe conspicuously did not take when first faced with this issue — because of the supposed respect he receives from the bureaucracy? (Remember back to September when this was mentioned frequently as one of the strong points of his candidacy for the LDP presidency.) Is it a matter of principle, a burst of Koizumism? Or is it simply an expression of LDP survival politics, an acknowledgment that the LDP is more than willing to jettison the bureaucracy's privileges to save itself?

Whatever the case may be, it would truly be a shame if Mr. Masuzoe — who, as I've discussed before, sincerely believes in the need to transform the bureaucracy to limit the kind of behavior noted above by the prime minister — were to be forced out of the cabinet as a result of the bureaucratic misdeeds against which he has railed.

"The state is less dependable than a convenience store"

Masuzoe Yoichi, minister of health, labor, and welfare and the LDP's resident political scientist, has an essay in the December issue of Chuo Koron in which he details the crisis of confidence in the Japanese state and calls for systemic change that will restore the confidence of the people in their government.

The title of his article — which I've borrowed for the title of this post — is based on the idea that somehow banks, post offices, and convenience stores manage to handle the transfer of funds without problems, but the national and local governments cannot transfer social security payments without embezzlement. In part one, he pins the blame squarely on bureaucrats.

"From old it is said, 'Kanson minpi [bureaucrats exalted, the people despised],' with the hidden premise being that bureaucrats are steadfast and the people terrible. However, now it is the exact opposite of that. Therefore, it is basically good to entrust "to the people that which the people can do."

In the second part, he discusses how the scandal-ridden Social Insurance Agency — part of his ministerial ambit — cultivates a culture of unaccountability for lower officials. As he writes, "In other words, since there are no orders from above and a lack of scrupulous oversight, it happens anyone can do whatever they want. The result is that this invites the occurrence of scandals like the sloppy management of records and embezzlement." He even goes so far as to suggest that the contemporary bureaucracy, as a system of irresponsibility, is "completely the same as the Japanese Imperial Army."

His solution is the implementation of a top-down system in which responsibility and accountability are clear.

In addition, he suggests that other checks on administration are needed, pointing to the example of the ombudsmen in Scandinavian countries. And he suggests that rather than viewing the nejire kokkai as a bad thing, it might be a good thing for accountability in Japanese governance. (Indeed, it was for this very reason that I think that a grand coalition would be a bad thing.)

In the third part, he explores the Japanese policy agenda, looking at the implications of the faulty social welfare system for the Japanese economy as a whole. He argues that consumer spending is low due to fears of inadequate care in old age. Ergo, if the Japanese government can alleviate insecurities about retirement, it can get people to spend more, jump-starting the Japanese economy. He suggests that an increase in the consumption tax rate from 5 to 10% is necessary, with the difference alloted to maintaining the social welfare system. Accordingly, the more people the spend, the better funded the welfare system. (This proposal strikes me as too good to be true — and it's not entirely clear to me why people wouldn't react to a consumption tax hike by spending less.)

Mr. Masuzoe concludes by calling for radical restructuring of Japanese sub-national governance, reorganizing prefectures into larger regions with radical subsidiarity, reducing the central government to nothing more than the cabinet office and the foreign, defense, justice, and finance ministries.

Mr. Masuzoe's heart is in the right place, so to speak. In particular, longtime readers of this blog will be aware of my belief in the importance of systems of accountability both inside and outside of government. Mr. Masuzoe clearly recognizes that Japan is missing the institutional checks present in other democracies that ferret out and punish wrongdoing by legislators and bureaucrats. Its courts are weak, its prosecutors face a standard of evidence that keeps many cases from going to trial, its agencies lack ombudsmen and inspectors general, its journalists and media outlets have all-too-cozy relationships with those in power (without a tradition of investigative journalism), and the political parties and the Diet, thanks to the LDP's nearly uninterrupted hold on power, are enablers of bureaucratic incompetence and corruption rather than a check on administrative abuses. NGOs are a recent arrival, and many depend on the government for funding.

In other words, this is where Mr. Masuzoe and other reformers should focus their attention. Regular alternation of ruling parties will help too, of course, but barring that reformers should push for the creation of accountability systems throughout the Japanese government.

Meanwhile regional subsidiarity strikes me as a scheme that would, if anything, ensure that certain rural regions that are already dying would have even less chance of reversing their fortunes. As MTC notes in the post linked to above, the central bureaucracy has much to answer for as far as the decimation of the Japanese countryside is concerned. But it is not altogether clear to me how removing impoverished regions from the hands of the central government and putting them into the hands of cash-strapped regional governments will make them any more likely to thrive. As a matter of principle, subsidiarity is great — after all, as students of the American progressive movement know, states can be the laboratories of democracy. But moving government closer to the people is no guarantee of good governance; I think it's just as likely that the mega-regional governments in Mr. Masuzoe's scheme could be just as prone to profligacy and venality as Tokyo has been.

In short, I agree with Mr. Masuzoe's diagnosis, but I don't think he paid nearly enough attention to the cure.

The Fukuda fakeout

Earlier this week, Masuzoe Yoichi, health minister, suggested that a snap election may be possible within the year, fueling speculation of an imminent dissolution of the Diet as a result of parliamentary deadlock.

He was promptly reprimanded by Chief Cabinet Secretary Machimura, who clarified that it is the prime minister's responsibility — the prime minister's alone — to dissolve the House of Representatives and call an election, and that it is inappropriate for a member of the cabinet to address this (no matter how many books on politics, including one on the premiership, to his name).

Prime Minister Fukuda, too, jokingly chided himself for hinting at the possibility of a snap election at an informal gathering of cabinet members.

But behind the jokes, however, is the very real concern that should the LDP call an election now, it could face a defeat that would make the July defeat look like an LDP triumph. Miyagawa Takayoshi, head of the Center for Political Public Relations, had an article in the October 18th issue of Shukan Bunshun (not online) in which he describes his predictions for a general election.

In short, disaster for the LDP:

LDP 197 (down 110 from 307, 134 single-seat constituencies)
Komeito 23 (down 8 from 31)

DPJ 224 (up 111 from 113, 145 single-seat constituencies)

Combined with slight gains or no change among the other opposition parties, the opposition as a whole would have 260 of the Lower House's 480 seats. The article goes into some detail about the components of this dramatic shift, with change concentrated in Hokkaido (where the DPJ already has a strong foothold and will be running against LDP heavyweights like Mr. Machimura and former PARC chairman Nakagawa Shoichi) and Tokyo, where the DPJ saw its position nearly wiped out in 2005 (another article in this issue suggests that Mr. Ozawa might consider jumping constituencies from Iwate to Tokyo, confident that the vacated seat will be picked up by the DPJ candidate).

A couple things leap out at me. First, even if this outcome comes to pass, the DPJ will still need a total of seventeen more seats to secure a governing majority, which will mean turning to some combination of Kokumin Shinto, SDP, the Japan Party, Suzuki Muneo's Great Earth Party, and an assortment of independents (not to mention the Communists, who may be an unlikely coalition partner but who may play a decisive role in the next election by changing their electoral strategy and limiting the number of candidates they run in the next general election). The opposition parties may be cooperating now, but would a governing coalition fall into place easily under Mr. Ozawa, given memories of the last multi-party coalition engineered by Mr. Ozawa? Obviously this case would be different, given the DPJ's overwhelming dominance of a coalition, but the DPJ would still depend on its coalition partners in order to govern, despite the discrepancy in numbers.

Second, and more significantly, given the prospects of a defeat of this magnitude, why would Mr. Fukuda decide to call an early election that would mean the end of LDP rule? If the party had even a remote possibility of restoring its prospects over the next twenty-three months, why would it act within the next three, as suggested by Mr. Masuzoe? Sure, it could get worse for the LDP, and the DPJ could take an outright majority, but it seems like that's a risk worth taking.

And I think the LDP knows this, which is why I suspect that any references to an early election from Mr. Fukuda or his inner circle are intended more to rattle the DPJ than to signal serious intentions of calling an early election. Why? Because as suggested by Mr. Koizumi's new "mainstream / anti-mainstream" thesis, the closer an election seems, the more the DPJ will go on the attack and try to widen the differences between it and the LDP. Like bullfighting in a Bugs Bunny cartoon, Mr. Fukuda can wave the cape of an early election, prompting Mr. Ozawa to lower his head and charge, only to withdraw the cape and have the DPJ slam head on into the cold, hard anvil of another two years (at least) of divided government.

All of this depends, of course, on Mr. Fukuda's retaining his teflon coat — or to stick with the metaphor, remaining the calm, unflappable matador untouched by the turmoil around him. As Jun Okumura suggests, Mr. Fukuda's cabinet might even be on the brink of losing its allure and seeing its popularity plummet should its new anti-terror law stall in the Diet thanks to Moriya Takemasa's allegations. But I still have strong doubts that Mr. Fukuda will cave into a snap election quickly.

As for Mr. Miyagawa's predictions, I haven't checked them thoroughly, but I intend to do my own breakdown and predictions for the 300 single-seat constituencies soon, critiquing Mr. Miyagawa's in the process.

What role will Masuzoe play?

"The leader's magnanimity, symbolized by the appointment of Mr. Masuzoe."

That is the headline on a Mainichi article discussing the appointment of Masuzoe Yoichi as the new minister of healthy and welfare. Mr. Masuzoe, you will recall, was one of the fiercest critics of Mr. Abe's staying in office, arguing that the prime minister's decision ignored the will of the people as expressed in the Upper House elections.

Abe said in a press conference late Monday that he appointed Masuzoe to the critical post because he is capable of explaining to the people due to his "deep knowledge of pensions." Masuzoe was equally nonchalant about his appointment, saying, "Criticism is criticism. Now we must make the LDP one."

On some level, the prime minister deserves credit for bringing a staunch opponent into his cabinet, but the real credit will be earned when we see the impact Masuzoe has on the Abe government. Is he being brought into the government to be silenced, or will his presence actually serve to make the government more responsible to the voters, more honest about its mistakes, and more amenable to compromise and moderation? In other words, will Masuzoe have more impact on the Abe cabinet than the Abe cabinet has on him?