Before Wrapping It All Up

Wednesday, February 10 2010 @ 03:56 PM CST

Wanted dead rather than alive
From left:
■ It is evident from the headline of yet another Daily Yomiuri crap dated Jan. 25 that the media remain Ozawa's best friend.
■ Ozawa's henchman Ishikawa is currently out on bail.
■ "Justice" Minister Chiba implicitly ordered the prosecutors to let her boss off the hook.
■ Finance Minister Kan told the National Tax Agency not to grill habitual tax evaders such as Ozawa and Hatoyama any harder.

On February 4 the Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office announced that it had failed to establish a criminal case against Ichiro Ozawa. This came as no surprise because before arresting Ozawa's henchmen, the special investigation squad had allowed the gang to buy an ample amount of time to destroy all the evidence and fabricate a consistent story for every member of the gang to tell while in detention.

Even at the time of the deliberately delayed house search, newspaper reports had it that some of the documents seized by the investigators had been word-processed recently but backdated to several years ago. In a matter of 24 little hours, however, reporters stationed in the Kisha Kurabu (press club) attached to the Prosecutors Office suddenly stopped following up on their own leak about the forensic revelation.

As if to make up for their "failure" to bring Ozawa to justice, the corrupt and incompetent prosecutors indicted these small fish such as Ishikawa, as they always do.

For now he will keep swimming in the ocean of pus as he has done in the last four decades. This is certainly a bad news. The good news is that Ozawa is still on this side of bars, which means he is within our reach despite the further intensified police protection.

If you search for URLs relating to Ozawa's assassination, you will know more than 150,000 Netizens are talking about Ozawa's assassination in one way or the other. Some of them are saying, "小沢は万死に値する," (Ozawa wa banshi-ni ataisuru, or he deserves ten-thousand deaths.) So far nobody has dared to deliver one, but sooner rather than later he should know he has to pay the price in an unpredictable and unprecedented way. (Conventional tactics such as an attempt to stab the bastard will easily be thwarted because unlike former DPJ lawmaker Koki Ishii who was stabbed to death in 2002, Ozawa has always sided with the collusive alliance between police and yakuza.)

We've seen this too many times before

In the early-1990s the current Secretary General of the Democratic Party of Japan was already up to the same business he is in today. He left the Liberal Democratic Party in 1993 to explore a new gold vein with a lot of fanfare of a drastic political reform from the media alchemists.

His new party soon formed a coalition with two other new parties to take power.

One of the centerpieces of Ozawa's reform was a legislation to introduce a system to subsidize political parties with taxpayers' money while imposing some nominal restrictions on corporate donations. But he and his fellow lawmakers did not forget to leave a lot of loopholes that they would later exploit to the fullest.

Just for one thing, the new legislation left it to the discretion of the Justice Minister whether to demand the refund of the surplus fund when a party breaks up. Basically that is why Ozawa later founded yet another couple of parties only to liquidate them in a matter of several years. Successive Justice Ministers did not exercise their nominal right presumably because they couldn't tell whether Ozawa's parties were really new or he was just renaming old ones. Taking advantage of their reluctance to reclaim unused fund on behalf of taxpayers, the crook could pocket a good part of the money in the party coffers every time this happened.

Also he was careful enough not to make the statute of limitations any longer than three years. He was sure that he would be able to buy 3 years' time by getting the press corps stationed in the particular Kisha Kurabu attached to his office preoccupied with red-herrings generously provided to them.

Ian Buruma wrote of these turbulent years in his Inventing Japan (Random House, 2003): "It turned out to be another false dawn." The author was absolutely right because a false dawn was exactly what it was.

Buruma went on to say, "By 1997, Ozawa and his fellow rebels against the LDP were finished." But he was mistaken here.

A similar thing happened in 2005 when another champion of reform by the name of Koizumi won an overwhelming victory with his tricky campaign pledge of postal privatization that was only intended to allow voracious U.S. financial institutions free access to more than $2 trillion in postal savings. Needless to say, the media hailed Koizumi's empty rhetoric about a small government at that time.

Then came another "watershed" in August last year. The Japanese were witnessing Ozawa and other LDP defectors seize power from the party in which they had grown into full-blown racketeers.

The Hatoyama administration, however, looked extremely shaky up until recently. But the moment the prosecutors office backed down at the last minute, it started looking to have regained unchallenged stability. After all, voters are all aware these guys in the DPJ and the LDP are essentially of the same stripe and that if they switched back to the latter, that wouldn't make a bit of difference. In all likelihood the prime minister and his guardian will once again ride out the scandals they have been mired in - unless an extraordinary thing happens, that is.

In the meantime this country will go around in circles.

The same old media gimmicks

Each time this society was seized by a fit of hiccups or emeses, media obscurantists did an excellent job to prevent the 1955 System from falling apart, by duping the world's most gullible people into believing that this nation is still reformable and a new, viable Japan is on the horizon. Recent examples of their modi operandi to trivialize the magnitude of the problems inherent in the System included:

■ Juxtapose Ozawa stories side by side with something else in the same newspaper pages or same TV "variety shows." The January 13 raid on Ozawa's office and some construction companies' coincided with Mark McGwire's confession of abusing steroids some ten years ago. This enabled the Daily Yomiuri to treat the Japan's most unscrupulous policymaker and the former major leaguer in the same way and in the same placement. These guys certainly know how to relativize things. And do I have to add that the media hype over Bankuubaa Orinpikku (the Vancouver Olympics) has now gone over the top and swept away all the sequels of the Ozawa/Hatoyama scandals in it? Actually a group of citizens has filed a complaint against prosecutors' decision not to indict Ozawa. But the detail information is available only on the web.

■ Spread tricky words all over and around the clock. One example is the "modern two-party system." The fancy words are always intended to mislead their audience to believe that the political system in place here has a certain resemblance to the way it is in the U.S. or U.K. But the fact of the matter remains that it's not a two-party system, but one formed by twin parties. Worse, they are as inseparable as Siamese twins. No offense to those with the birth defect is intended here, but without doubt Japan's sociopolitical system has an inoperable flaw. Ozawa, Hatoyama, and other key party cadres are all from the most corrupt faction of the Liberal Democratic Party. The reference to a microscope in the crappy article shown at the top of this post is another case in point. Actually it takes a telescope that gives you a panoramic, rather than microscopic, view when scrutinizing Ozawa's meticulously plotted felonies in the context of the whole system.

■ Fabricate "public opinions" so the twin parties take power essentially in turns. The easiest way to achieve this end is to conduct, or pretend to conduct to be more precise, a scientific survey as frequently as every week, and release unaudited results. "Scientific" here just means that a small number of largely imaginary pollees are picked through the "Random Digit Dialing" method as if a couple of thousand phantoms can represent more than 100 million Japanese voters. This way they staged another landslide, this time for the DPJ, in August 2009. Amid the fuss over the series of scandals involving many party cadres, the prime minister could say, "The voters have given us a mandate to reform our nation although they were already aware that we are not totally free of practices that invite suspicion."

■ Constantly sidetrack subjects from real issues. Ozawa's business has nothing, whatsoever, to do with ideologies. An ape like him can't be an ideologue. But the Sankei Shimbun, for one, often finds fault with his ideological tilt. Ozawa paid a courtesy call on Hu Jintao in 2009. Back in 1990, Kim Il-sung redcarpeted the clandestine mission headed by Shin Kanemaru and Ozawa. He is also known to be an ardent advocate of giving a limited suffrage to Chinese and Korean residents in Japan. Every time his pro-Beijing or pro-Pyongyang stance surfaces, the daily that claims to uphold "conservative" editorial views never fails to become vocal about his quislingism but that only serves as an ignoratio elenchi in favor of Ozawa.

■ In the wake of Ozawa's scandal, TV viewers watched several press conferences telecast live where the de facto leader of the Hatoyama administration "fulfilled" his setsumei sekinin (accountability.) But he could always breeze through the question-and-answer session because the queries he had to field there had all been prescreened, or even preplanted.

Despite his unparalleled insight into Japanese politics, Ian Buruma was not foresighted enough to predict that Ichiro Ozawa won't be finished until these media obscurantists are finished. You can't totally rule out the possibility that he steps down as Secretary-General of the DPJ, but that only happens if and when the Japanese voters take back their mandate in less than one year in the Upper House election scheduled for July. It seems quite unlikely, though, because the media think it's too early to go back to the other twin.

My blogging principle: Destructionism rather than negativism

When I launched this political blog in August 2004, I said I wanted to make it a genuinely taboo-free opinion journal. But did I assume it would be a breeze for this exceptionally outspoken Japanese blogger to be really taboo-free? Not at all.

It's true that time and again I've called my targets names. Believe it or not, though, splashing pejoratives all over is not my favorite pastime. Moreover, I was aware all along that making my audience raise their eyebrows at my un-PC remarks was far from enough to make a difference.

In a piece uploaded on September 3, 2004, I disparaged Shintaro Ishihara for his glossy rhetoric about "reform from within." I knew that it would be a total waste of time to target a small-time villain like him. Even so I thought that it would make sense to refer to the famous contention being fought in the early-1950s on a French political journal named "Les Temps Modernes" (The Modern Times) in connection with the "social Neanderthal" as Australian journalist Ben Hills dubs the Tokyo Governor.

The dispute was over the difference between rebels and revolutionaries. The camp behind revolutionaries was arguing that if one is really determined to fight against something, or someone, the first thing he has to do is to destroy it because otherwise he will develop dependence on his enemy over time. To paraphrase this argument, a rebel remains nobody without an enemy to fight against.

In another piece I posted in October 2005, I wrote Mikhail Gorbachev is one of the greatest destruction artists in modern history. Needless to say the last president of the USSR had never said, "Be prepared, comrades, because I am going to destroy the Soviet Union." Instead he quietly laid a landmine called glasnost. He was a real revolutionary. Putin's Russia certainly indicates that just destroying the edifice was not enough. But that does not mean that you can build a new nation without destroying the old one.

Admittedly, I might have abandoned my principle if a certain amount of bucks had been at stake in my blogging activity. Fortunately or unfortunately, things didn't unfold that way. So all along I've adhered to my destructionist approach.

Gorby's stellar background and career are not really comparable to mine, but just the same I have tried hard to do my best to get rid of my targets. To date I have done everything I could do to that end. If I have any regret at this moment, it is the fact that most people have mistaken my principle for negativism.

Love your enemies

Let's face it:

In these twilight years of one civilization, it's your adversary, not friend, that creates a job for you.

What underlies the dismal jobs picture everywhere is the fact that enemies are chronically in short supply. So we are all dying for enemies to turn around the situation. And unfortunately, rather than fortunately, no all-out warfare is going on anywhere in the world at this moment, while the pointless skirmishes in Afghanistan and Iraq are lingering on and on. This further aggravates our suffering from an acute shortage of foes.

In that context the American people should never expect the friendly moron in the White House to be able to create jobs for millions just out of thin air.

Talking of Obama, he is now telling his people to fight against the new-found enemy named carbon dioxide as if to gloss over his complete failure to deliver on his other empty promises. A little less than 50% of the American people still believe they can count on their president for cutting greenhouse gas emissions 28% by the year 2020. This is really astounding because it's obvious that someone who doesn't have a clear vision of tomorrow can't foretell what's to become of America ten years from now.

His Japanese counterpart is even more retarded. For one thing Hatoyama never understands that the gut issue underlying the fuss over the relocation of the U.S. Marine Corps' Futenma Air Station lies with the fact his people can't think of any enemy for the Marine Corps to protect them against. Relatively sane people simply can't visualize an external threat allegedly being posed to them.

Hatoyama is an avowed peacenik. He has inherited from his equally dumb grandpa, Ichiro Hatoyama, an absurd "philosophy" about 友愛精神 (Yuai Seishin or spirit of fraternity.) The Hatoyamas have believed we should get along peacefully among ourselves and with foreigners. It's as though their beloved country hasn't changed a bit since the early-7th century when Shotoku Prince promulgated his 17-article constitution.

In this taboo-ridden nation, it's a no-no to ask about specific rationale for staying under the U.S. protection. But what if a nut like me dared to ask the prime minister this question? He would certainly have to resort to a pedestrian argument that North Korea might fire a Nodong with a real warhead at Tokyo if his country terminated the 50-year-old security treaty. In fact, though, the probability of a North Korean aggression toward this dead country is as remote as the likelihood of the habitual liar in Washington redeeming the treaty obligation for "collective defense in an emergency" at the cost of American lives. We must conclude from this that Japan's prime minister is an idiot or liar, or both.

In this connection, it is obvious that the Japanese government might as well enter into a nonaggression treaty with China, North Korea, and/or Russia. You can't count on these rogue nations to honor the pact, but there is no reason to believe America is any more reliable.

That will make Japan's defense budget that topped $53 billion in 2008 a real bonus.

By the same token, Japanese pundits and professors have had to turn to imaginary enemies, domestically as well. Surprisingly enough, some of these learning-disabled people are still toying with their pet subject - the dwindling and aging population - amid the protracted downturn of economy. Now I'm really confused - which are in short supply, human beings or employment opportunities?

Most Americans are born busybodies

Basically the same thing can be said of their U.S. counterparts, except that they are innately busybodies while Japanese are born crybabies.

In the face of the drought of real enemies after the Iraq invasion, the most serious concern haunting Americans in writing and speaking business is where to find a good enemy, or if they can't, how to invent one.

There are two important criteria they have to use when identifying their targets. To them an ideal enemy should be:
■ a mock that they can fight without enlisting and risking their own lives
■ an imperishable one that ensures sustainable growth of their businesses.
It doesn't matter at all whether the enemy is real or phony.

There is one thing that comfortably meets these criteria. You know what?

IDEOLOGIES.

Any ideology serves the purposes. That is why so many Americans still cling to obsolete ideologies and are mongering phobias about opposing ideas.

In the last days of the Pacific War, Ruth Benedict wrote a book in which she coached the U.S. government on how to democratize what had been the imperial Japan. More specifically the author told Truman and MacArthur how to graft a false democracy into the nation which had remained a centralized feudalism. In short her approach was, "Let's deform the Japanese to our liking but be sure to keep them alive." History had never seen before one country destroy and rebuild another the way America did in the last half of the 1940s through the first half of the next decade.

Now it looks as though American critics and analysts model their business after the unprecedentedly perverted prescription written by the self-proclaimed anthropologist. It takes first-rate arrogance and ignorance to believe this approach will work, while in fact it hasn't and will never.

It's a shame that these Americans are wasting their talent, if they have some, just because they don't want to be out of work. I don't know whether I have to laugh or feel sad seeing those ideologues who haven't read Das Kapital or delved into The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism in their lifetime adamantly giving lectures to each other.

Actually they don't have to bother to read these esoteric works by European thinkers. Instead they can base their arguments on the founding principles of their own country, which have nothing, whatsoever, to do with ideologies, if they have some religious implications. For instance, the word democracy cannot be found in the Declaration of Independence. To the best of my knowledge, America's founding fathers seldom uttered that lousy word.

As to the "international terrorism," they should realize that it's by and large a product of their delusions although I don't necessarily buy the conspiracy theory that says George W. Bush was teaming up with Osama bin Laden. The phantom who has been supposedly haunting us since 2001 will vanish the moment the American people wake up to the validness of Ron Paul's noninterventionism.

Let me reiterate this: The fact of the matter always remains that the most likely hideout of the real enemy is inside of their skulls.

Where to find real enemies

Unlike these ideologues, I have always zeroed in on the 1955 System. To that end I uploaded a post back in September 2004 to illustrate the System. Although it was a little too sketchy, almost 6,000 people have read it to date. I feel really grateful to these people for showing a keen interest in my former home country from this perspective despite all the hogwash widespread among Japanophilic Westerners that Japan is a democracy, and thus, shares the same values with the West.

I hope my piece helped its readers understand what this country really is, where it comes from, and where it's heading.

Actually, however, you can't fight the whole system single-handedly because there are three pillars bracing it (the Imperial Institution, the Press Club system cartelizing information, and the U.S.-Japanese security arrangement) and the rotten culture underlying them. One enemy is more than enough for a dying maverick to deal with.

Now that time is running out for me, I have almost singled out Ichiro Ozawa, knowing the bandit is only a product of the system, and not the other way around. My assumption is that when he is really finished, we will see an irreparable fissure or two on the surface of the 1955 System.

The ugliest part

At any rate I am aware that it's next to suicidal to actually apply my destructionist approach to a narrowly defined foe because as I wrote earlier in this piece, you can't make your living unless you strike a win-win deal with your enemy. Yet, I'm not swashbuckling; I really mean it when I say I'll do everything I can to physically ruin Ozawa.

I wasn't born in this country to get rid of these pests. Since the ultimate goal of my life is somewhere else, there is no room in my life for a wicked ape like him. But because of, rather than despite that, I find his existence too disturbing to tolerate.

If and when my health and time permit, I will upload a followup piece to elaborate on my murderous plan, or hopefully update you on its progress. I will possibly title that piece something like:

"Let Me Ask You One Last Question: If You Have One Bullet, Which One Will You Shoot at, Obama, Osama, Ozawa, or None?"

No matter what my plan will be like, I see a major drawback inevitably to be entailed in it: the fact that Japan's Constitution doesn't have its Second Amendment. Only cops, military personnel and yakuza mobsters are allowed to keep firearms. At present I don't know exactly how to get around the hindrance, but I think I should be able to overcome it at least by instigating some of these armed guys to perpetrate the bloody mission for me before the Grim Reaper claims my life.

I know the American people don't give a damn about Japan's fate, let alone Ozawa's. This is as if he wasn't a product of the CIA-funded system. But now I have realized that it's a total waste of time to tell them to revisit the postwar history of the two countries with unclouded eyes. They are people who look away from anything they don't want to know.

Yet I do care about whether the Americans will show their resilience to overcome formidable problems facing them before it is too late. Now that Ron Paul's American Revolution looks to have been hijacked by old Republicans disguised as "Tea Partiers," likelihood is remote that someone fires the bullet at the right target anytime soon. But I leave it there for now.

Sorry for my inability to twitter. I am still very wordy simply because I don't take anything for granted.

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