Anyone Bother to Get Him?

Wednesday, January 20 2010 @ 01:34 AM CST

For quite a while, my former fellow countrymen have been saying that the 1955 System is dead by now with a new Japan emerging on the horizon. Simply, that can't be true. The three pillars of the rotten regime - the "2,670"-year-old imperial institution, the 120-year-old cartel of information, and the 50-year-old U.S.-Japanese security treaty - are still there and remain intact. In fact, the System is now in full bloom.

What has fallen apart, instead, is the entire society formed by these brain-dead people. It still shows weak vital signs, but that is simply because each component of the old edifice is functioning as a life-support system.

On the night of January 15 Ichiro Ozawa's former and current aides were vicariously nabbed by the Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office on behalf of their boss. Commentators, most of whom are retired investigators, cited as the reason behind the prosecutors' move the fact that they had thought these villains would otherwise destroy all the evidence, and even their own selves.

These pundits were lying for sure. If the Prosecutors Office had really feared that a good part of evidence, which would have substantiated what the poor straw men had already coughed up while in detention, would be incinerated or shredded, they must have acted much quicker. In fact it was only January 13 when the investigators raided their offices and the head-office of Kajima Corp., one of the dozens of construction companies the Secretary General of the DPJ has had cozy relationship with.

On the other hand, it is true that suicide could not be ruled out, but it is equally true that the arrest was meant to save Ozawa's henchmen from possibly being whacked.

Now it seems as though it was not only Ozawa but also the law enforcement authority that wanted to stall for time so as to mitigate the damage to their common vested interests in what some independent journalists have called a kleptocracy.

In the face of the belated and half-hearted challenge from the Prosecutors Office, the mastermind of the money-siphoning gadget does not look to wince at all. He even declared an "all-out war" against law enforcement. He must have a good reason to believe it's winnable as usual and that once the dust settles, he can go on swimming the sea of pus as he has done in the last four decades.

When the current Secretary General of the DPJ was with the then ruling Liberal Democratic Party, he was one of the key members of the most corrupt intra-party faction founded by the scandal-tainted prime minister Kakuei Tanaka. It's been known that when his boss was arrested on the charge of the Lockheed bribery case, Ozawa was always spotted sitting in the court gallery.

He did the same thing when his brethren, Shin Kanemaru and Noboru Takeshita, were taken to court. That way, he has learned that robbers like them can always find ways to neutralize law enforcement, and that by doing so, they can minimize the damage resulting from investigations into their wrongdoing.

Needless to say, the most classic way for a nefarious felon to cover up the enormity of his crime is to willingly admit to the smallest part of it. That's what Ozawa is doing now with the illegal fund of 400 million yen ($4.4 million.) To him 400 million is just peanuts.

Another thing that makes Ozawa's life even easier is that for him it's a breeze to silence Diet members. Lawmakers in his own party are as docile as the members of the Chinese Communist Party, but key members of the major opposition LDP (mostly his former colleagues) are essentially no different. Ozawa is so unscrupulous as to make them look like small-time thieves, but he knows inside out that they are no cleaner.

All it takes for Ozawa to deter them from speaking up, therefore, is to say, "I have first-hand knowledge about what you guys have been up to all the while. Let's face it; we are people of the same stripe. You better not spit into the wind."

Equally important, the de facto leader of the DPJ knows how to make the most of the Kisha Kurabu (Press Club) system to prevent the media obscurantists from telling the whole truth about his wrongdoing. As Laurie Anne Freeman observed in her Closing the Shop (Princeton University Press, 2000), before he left the LDP for a new gold vein, Ozawa had already made it known to the members of the exclusive club that the only way to keep their jobs is to hush it up or gloss it over whenever he made a dubious move.

Freeman depicted the story about Ozawa's 1990 trip to Pyongyang. The then Secretary General of the LDP, along with Shin Kanemaru, went there to have clandestine talks over some lucrative business with Kim Il-sung. At that time an Asahi Shimbun reporter dared to describe what they did at the cost of national interests as dogeza gaiko, or prostration diplomacy. The consequence: the guy simply lost his job.

Now all the mainstream news organizations are saying in concert that Ozawa should be held accountable for the source of the fund at issue as if Japanese people are dying for an explanation from the thief on how he got his hand on it while, in fact, it is just the tip of the tip of the huge loot-berg. This is how they marginalize the enormity of Ozawa's crime.

The Sankei Shimbun, the daily that falsely claims to be the most right-leaning of all, uses a little different trick to distort things about Ozawa. Taking advantage of his pro-Pyongyang, pro-Beijing stance, the newspaper is becoming more and more vocal about his unpatriotic argument that Koreans and other ethnic groups with permanent resident status should be given suffrage. Since the bandit has no ideological leaning at all, though, Sankei's campaign is totally irrelevant here and only serves to distract people's attention from his criminal acts.

Perhaps even more important, the Japanese at large are impossible dupes. The world's most gullible and suggestible people are still swallowing whatever these editors and reporters are feeding them.

In the total absence of reliable information about people's take on the Ozawa affair, I spent the whole afternoon yesterday browsing through the web. For that purpose I used Google because the search engine has regained our trust thanks to its recent move in China.

When I keyed in a search string "小沢 暗殺" (ozawa assassination), 86,600 results came up. This was by far outnumbered by URLs that came up when I used a search string "obama assassination." But I have somehow gathered that people's desire for seeing Ichiro Ozawa physically eliminated is much more real and compelling.

Aside from numbers of websites, it is noteworthy that unlike with the search results for Obama assassination, URLs concerning Ozawa assassination include both assassination of Ozawa and assassination by Ozawa. Actually, he has long been suspected to have told his henchmen to get rid of anyone who stood in his way.

In this relation, it is also noteworthy that 856,000 websites came up when I keyed in a search string "小沢 ヤクザ 関係” (ozawa yakuza link.) This was outnumbered by 2,530,000 URLs that came up from a search for "obama mafia link." But once again, I could tell Ozawa's links with criminal syndicates are more real and better-substantiated.

When I was the local Chief Financial Officer at a Zurich-based trading company by the name of Siber Hegner, I often defied my boss's order to fabricate the company books. On those occasions my boss, a Swiss expat, never failed to say, "If you are going to whistleblow or blackmail us, you should bear in mind that the attorney we have retained since the time when our company was on the verge of being unionized is a righthand man of Ozawa-sensei. He is always prepared to destroy anyone who attempts to destroy us. We know he is a real pro at that." (The Swiss CEO formed quotation marks with his thick fingers when he uttered the word "attorney.")

Although I am not really concerned about the fate of my former home country now, I'm still distracted by all these disturbances from concentrating on my new activity which has nothing to do with Japan's fate, or any other country's for that matter.

It is only for that reason that I want to see Ichiro Ozawa get done away with by one of those owners of the websites instigating his assassination in one way or the other.

A URL assures us that the CIA will soon poison him, but I am not inclined to believe in the theory because the owner of the website is Benjamin Fulford, the famous Canadian conspiracy theorist based in Tokyo.

Ozawa's elimination, alone, won't make any difference to the fate of the terminally-ill nation but I will have graduated from politics at long last only when that happens.

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