Two weeks

After negotiations between the DPJ and the LDP, the parties have agreed that a special session will be convened on 16 September to elect Hatoyama Yukio as Japan's prime minister. The DPJ had wanted the session to meet on the 15th, which was apparently inconvenient for the Emperor. With the prime minister and his cabinet selected by mid-September, Hatoyama should have no problem attending the opening of the UN General Assembly on the 23rd and the Pittsburgh summit of the G20 form the 24th.

Meanwhile, Yamaoka Kenji, the DPJ's Diet strategy chair, has said that the DPJ intends to occupy the chairs of all standing committees, perhaps mostly a symbolic gesture but one that should make it that much harder for the LDP to block the government's agenda. (It's going to take some time to get accustomed to talking about the LDP in the role of an opposition party.)

More significantly, the DPJ has demanded that the LDP yield the chairmanship of the upper house budget committee, which the DPJ allotted to the LDP when it took control of the upper house in 2007 in recognition of the LDP's position as the ruling party. The LDP has not yet replied — it may drag its feet a bit, but ultimately the LDP will be hard-pressed to resist the DPJ's demand.

Now for Hatoyama to name his cabinet — at least the important posts — quickly and start filling in some of the sub-cabinet posts to ensure that the DPJ will be able to get off to a running start.

The foolish crusade against the House of Councillors

In May 2008, I wrote about the creation of an LDP study group with the goal of eliminating the House of Councillors — the Diet's upper house — and moving to a unicameral system, a proposal that I suggested was an anti-democratic temper tantrum in response to DPJ control of the upper chamber.

This proposal and its advocates, however, are still at work trying to undermine Japanese democracy. The study group is working hard to introduce a plank demanding a unicameral system into the LDP's manifesto for the next general election. As Yamamoto Ichita, a member of the study group, explains, the proposal is not just to dissolve the upper house but to dissolve both houses and create a new unicameral legislature with significantly fewer legislators. The plan calls for the number of legislators to be cut by thirty percent and for single-member districts to give way to prefecture-wide multi-member districts. He claims it isn't simply a response to the DPJ's control of the upper house.

As I noted last year, given that such a radical change would require Japan's first ever constitutional amendment (Article 42: "The Diet shall consist of two Houses, namely the House of Representatives and the House of Councillors"), and given that the days of the government's supermajority are almost certainly numbered, this proposal is singularly farfetched. It is doubtful whether this proposal would receive majority support, let alone supermajority support. Prime Minister Aso is circumspect; Komeito is favorably disposed to cutting the number of legislators but opposed to removing the upper house; and the DPJ's Ozawa Ichiro thinks this should not be a subject for discussion at all before a general election.

So why am I writing about this proposal?

Only because it shows how batty some LDP members have gotten as their party has decayed. Not only do this proposal's proponents — including the past four prime ministers — ignore the steep obstacles standing in the way of ever making a unicameral system a reality given present political circumstances, but they are so short-sighted that they fail to realize that given the probability of the LDP's going into opposition, the upper house will be a useful tool for crafting an LDP revival.

The DPJ, the upper house's largest party but not the majority party, needs every vote it can get in order to control the upper chamber. For now, it is dependent on the Social Democrats and the People's New Party. Even if the DPJ wins an absolute majority in the lower house and forms a government, it will still have to cobble together working coalitions in the upper house. In this situation, the LDP will be powerful both as a potential partner and as a potential spoiler of DPJ plans. The same will apply to Komeito. Surely the members of the coalition parties, surrounded by signs of impending collapse, have begun thinking about what life in opposition will be like. Surely they know all too well that the upper house can be a useful platform for disrupting government business.

But the unicameralists not only exhibit a shortsightedness on the part of LDP members, they show how LDP members have looked to attribute policy failures to anyone or anything but their own party. Naturally there are exceptions, most notably Mr. Koizumi and his followers. But the desire to blame structural forces — the electoral system, the parliamentary system, the policymaking system — is persistent, and unconvincing.

How can the same structures that in many ways sustained LDP rule now suddenly be contributing to the LDP's demise? For example, if the much-vilified bureaucracy, Nakagawa Hidenao's bete noire, has misgoverned Japan, the obvious question is why the LDP has allowed the bureaucracy to make such a mess of things. Mr. Nakagawa would answer that the bureaucracy is an all-powerful complex — which Mr. Nakagawa explicitly describes as akin to Eisenhower's "military-industrial complex" — that is capable of manipulating the LDP, the media, the universities, and so on.

Not good enough. At some point the LDP, accountable to the public for policy, must pay the price for failures. No more excuses. No more scapegoats.

The dissidents depart

In an unexpected but not wholly surprising move, the DPJ's upper-house dissidents will announce Thursday that they're leaving the DPJ to form their own party, citing the DPJ's failure to put the people before politics as the reason for their departure.

The rebels — Watanabe Hideo and Oe Yasuhiro (both representatives from the DPJ national PR list) — infamously voted with the government on its plans for road construction and the temporary gasoline tax. They also opposed the DPJ's position on the Bank of Japan succession, and Mr. Oe abstained from the vote on the upper house's censure motion of Prime Minister Fukuda, citing poor health. (They will also, it seems, take Himei Yumiko, a first-term upper house member from Okayama from the DPJ too.)

In short, these two members opted for the Lieberman approach, nominally members of the DPJ who helped prop up opposition control of the upper house, but opposed the DPJ on every important issue of the ordinary Diet session.

The problem is that both Mr. Watanabe and Mr. Oe owe their political careers to the DPJ, seeing as how they were elected on the national list. As MTC asked when they voted against the government, "Can one walk out with a proportional seat? Or leave with it under one's arm after being expelled from the party?"

Apparently they can, and suffer no consequence for their desertion. The DPJ executive is reportedly trying to persuade them to stay in the party, in fact.

However, seeing as how they already decided to support the government on important matters and seeing as how the new party will number a total of five (two independents in addition to the three deserters), Messrs. Watanabe and Mr. Oe will be quickly forgotten. The DPJ is still the largest party in the upper house, and the caucus has been cleansed of two members who made very clear that they had little interest in having "DPJ" after their names.

This is another sign, however, of just how little power the DPJ has over its more willful members.

In fact, another willful DPJ member was flaunting his independence Wednesday. Maehara Seiji, the hawkish former party leader who made a big show of criticizing Ozawa Ichiro's leadership and emphasizing the need for a contested election earlier in the summer before backing down, spoke at the Foreign Correspondents Club. He reiterated the importance of an electoral challenge to Mr. Ozawa in next month's leadership election, and blamed himself for failing to play "a coordinating role." He hardly sounds like someone who has come to acknowledge the wisdom of uniting in preparation for a general election. He also emphasized the need for a substantial Japanese contribution in Afghanistan, a proposal that is unlikely to receive an enthuasiastic response from his party (although who knows what Mr. Ozawa is thinking this year on Afghanistan).

The DPJ shouldn't overreact to the independence of members like Mr. Maehara. Their independence shows that the idea of Mr. Ozawa's "dictatorial" control of the DPJ is mostly a myth. There's little the party executive can do anyway. Better off letting the young turks speak their minds instead of cornering them and forcing them to choose between staying in the party, subdued or leaving to form their own party or joint the LDP.

UPDATE: The new micro-party is called the "Reform Club."

Thinking more about this, I can't help but wonder how this happened. In Mr. Watanabe's case, it seems that his was only the slightest of attachments to the DPJ. A six-term lower house member who had served as a secretary to Nakasone Yasuhiro and postal minister, he lost his seat to Tanaka Makiko and was cast adrift, winding up as a Liberal Party PR candidate in the 1998 upper house election. Mr. Watanabe apparently nurses a grudge against Mr. Ozawa dating from the merger between the Liberal Party and the DPJ, after which Mr. Ozawa failed to support Mr. Watanabe in the 2004 upper house election. Mr. Oe apparently nurses a similar grudge against Mr. Ozawa, and would not be out of place in the LDP's "True Conservative Study Group."

In short, the Reform Club is an overdue consequence of the merger between the DPJ and the more conservative Liberal Party. Why Mr. Ozawa tolerated their presence for long is the question? I can understand that once Mr. Watanabe won his seat in 2004 there was little Mr. Ozawa could do about him. But how did Mr. Oe find a place on the party list last year? Yes, he had been elected on the Liberal list in 2001, but given his hostility — which presumably existed prior to July 2007 — couldn't he have been dropped? Was the DPJ that desperate for experienced candidates that it would take whoever it could find who had political experience? If so, I hope Mr. Ozawa and the DPJ have learned their lesson.