Japan's political landscape as of 2004

With new political parties mushrooming in recent weeks, the media are untiringly saying that we are going to see a new Japan emerging through 政界再編成 (Seikai Saihensei, or total realignment of the political landscape) and that will be the end of the 1955 System.

Up until weeks ago, the same media kept telling their audience that with a "modern two party-system" taking root at long last here, the 55-year-old sociopolitical system was finally coming to an end.

As usual they were lying.

As I have said many times before, it's not a two-party system in the first place; actually it's a twin-party system composed of the Democratic Party of Japan which won the last election and the Liberal Democratic Party which lost it.

Now almost in the same breath, they have started talking about realignment aimed at a tripolar system with these new-born parties forming 第三極 (Daisan Kyoku, literally translated into English as a third pole.)

If we should take their hogwash seriously, now we are going to see triplets. As you can easily imagine, it's by far more difficult to separate conjoined triplets than with Siamese twins.

It is true that the above-embedded diagram would have to be brought up to date to reflect the new picture. But I don't think anyone will bother to work on that. Reason: it's something like drawing a picture of soap bubbles that form here now, evaporate there then.

Moreover, on the updated chart that would grow even busier to look at, all you could see would be just an increased number of boxes.

In reality, however, the same old political racketeers are hopping, back and forth, from one box to another.

They claim they are rejuvenating themselves. True, there are an increasing number of younger lawmakers. Yet, the fact of the matter remains that most of them are brainless punks as exemplified by those 小沢チルドレン (Ozawa Chirudoren, or Ozawa Children.) You can see these cultist-like morons in the YouTube video embedded here.

If there are a few exceptions, Yoshimi Watanabe is one. He looks to be a real reformist. Ironically enough, his father was one of those porkbarrel operators of the LDP until he died in 1995. He recently left the LDP to form みんなの党 (Minna-no To, or Your Party.) But needless to say, Watanabe, alone, can't bring about real change.

In the past the Japanese have traditionally substituted realignment for revolution. Every time they hit the wall, they realigned their political landscape to make it look different. But this unviable polity has always remained essentially unchanged. · read more (87 words)

It's not just that these "old runaways," as some call these LDP defectors all in their late-60s or well into 70s, have lost their way, but they have also run out of words for their party name. Bland words such as "liberal," "democratic" and "people's" have all been used up by now. That's why they brought the first-rate swindler named Shintaro Ishihara (posed on the extreme right of the photo) into the picture.

The five former senior members of the Liberal Democratic Party were at a loss over what specifically to do to prevent the ruling Democratic Party of Japan from further "wreaking havoc on this country." But when it came to the naming, they certainly knew who to turn to. Duping the extraordinarily gullible Japanese into believing in empty words is Ishihara's only forte.

That's how they came up with the fancy name - Tachiagare Nippon (起ち上がれ日本党) or Rise Up Japan Party. And that's why the 75-year-old self-proclaimed rightwinger attended today's kickoff meeting before the press corps. Although he volunteered to stand godfather to the new party, he stopped short of becoming one of the founding members himself for an obvious reason.

In exchange for his favor, however, he took the liberty to put his pet subject - constitutional amendment - at the top of the policy statement of the new group. This also helped the founders. Kaoru Yosano, one of them, was the last Finance Minister of the LDP administration who was known for his fiscal conservatism. But, aside from Yosano's unarticulated aspiration to stem the further snowballing of fiscal deficits, they'd had no ideas about what to do to reverse the disastrous situation facing this country until Ishihara extended an extra favor. Small wonder that they, wasting no time, took a bite at Ishihara's bait.

Actually these rebels, apparently suffering senile dementia, still think new laws can make a new Japan, while in fact it's always the other way around: it's a new breed of Japanese with firm resolve to transform themselves into sound and viable people that can make good laws.

Against this backdrop all the media organizations hastily took polls about constitutional amendment, as they have done hundred times in the past, and released the results, unaudited ones as usual. · read more (266 words)

Left: History of Japan's political landscape as of 2004 which is now subject to a minor update
Center: Streets of Yokohama China Town getting ready for the 60th anniversary of the Revolution
Right: Jiang, my friend from China

When I stepped out of my apartment on Sunday night, everything looked as usual except that some prettification work was going on here and there in the streets of the China Town in preparation for the 60th anniversary of the Chinese Revolution.

No sooner had I walked into the nearby Chinese eatery I frequent than my Chinese friend Jiang pointed at the large screen display and said, "Seems like a landslide for minshu-to (the Democratic Party of Japan.)" I said, "Bullshit. This is all prefixed. Nothing has changed, and nothing will. Four years ago we saw another landslide when the media said it was LDPs turn to win. It's just that the same media kept saying it's DPJ's turn this time around." This ignited a casual conversation about the trajectories of the two ailing, or even failing, countries - Japan and China. We talked over the resemblances and differences between the two.

I didn't expect any professional comment from the young guy because he majors in business administration at the Sanno Institute of Management. But if one studies business, it's more likely than with a politics major that he understands what exactly the word "change" means. I usually avoid discussing change because the abstract word in itself means nothing. As a matter of fact, my organization theory backed by my 46-year-long career tells me any institution has to go through a destruction phase before its rebirth. There is no such thing as smooth, incremental change. I would call what we are witnessing right now a metamorphosis rather than change. Japan has metamorphosed many times in the past, most recently in 1993. Yet it has remained essentially unchanged. Otherwise these candidates for the parliamentary election would not have called in concert for change just like they did 16 years ago, and in 2005 to a lesser degree.

I asked Jiang, "Don't you think your country would be better off if it imported the Japanese version of the representative democracy, so its people don't have to listen to Hillary Clinton's annual lecture on democracy anymore?" He answered: "I don't think that is possible in the next 50 years. But I think in the near future China should implement a limited suffrage." By "limited suffrage" he meant an electoral system within the framework of the single-party system. I said, "That's exactly what we have in place here since 1955. By virtue of our nominal voting rights, we have been exempted from attendance at Clinton's class. But at the same time, we are sunk by now for the same reason." · read more (332 words)

Only dead fish go with the flow. (Sarah Palin, July 4)

Earlier this week the latest figures of average life expectancy were released. The statistics showed that Japanese women are enjoying the world's longest life span of 86.05 years while Japanese men ranked No. 4 only next to their counterparts in Iceland, Switzerland and Hong Kong. This leaves you wondering what the heck we cling to our empty life that long for.

Here's another citation from The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.. Actually it's a requotation because author Ruth Benedict was just quoting a wartime broadcast which was all too familiar to the Japanese people of my age or older.

After the air battles were over, the Japanese planes returned to their base in small formations of three or four. A Captain was in one of the first planes to return. After alighting from his plane, he stood on the ground and gazed into the sky through binoculars. As his men returned, he counted. He looked rather pale, but he was quite steady. After the last plane returned he made out a report and proceeded to Headquarters. At Headquarters he made his report to the Commanding Officer. As soon as he had finished his report, however, he suddenly dropped to the ground. The officer on the spot rushed to give assistance but alas! he was dead. On examining his body it was found that it was already cold, and he had a bullet wound in his chest, which had proved fatal. It is impossible for the body of a newly-dead person to be cold. Nevertheless the body of the dead captain was as cold as ice. The Captain must have been dead long before, and it was his spirit that made the report. Such a miraculous fact must have been achieved by the strict sense of responsibility that the dead Captain possessed.

Constantly misguided by the dictionary that wrongly defines 民主主義 (minshu-shugi) as democracy, 天皇 (tenno) under the postwar Constitution as a useless but harmless figurehead, and 変革 (henkaku) as change, those arrogant, intellectually lazy, surface-scratching, cherry-picking Japan experts in the U.S. tend to underestimate our supernatural power to flexibly cross the boundary back and forth between life and death, or our propensity to roam around the border so aimlessly and interminably. Benedict and her fellow countrymen have always said that:
■ wartime Japanese were so superstitious as to believe in the absurd propaganda such as this one,
■ but after the war defeat they came out much smarter. · read more (479 words)

One of my in-laws is a CRPS sufferer. Complex Regional Pain Syndrome is a rare and refractory disease that causes psychosomatic regional pain and mysterious paralysis in any part of the body. Her husband has recently joined the site run by the leading SNS (Social Networking Services) provider, Mixi, to discuss online sensitive issues entailed in the illness and exchange tips about doctors and medication. So far he has been able to benefit a lot from the membership there without being annoyed by sinister trollers or those who want to peddle the special types of wheelchairs or pain-relieving substances. He is an exception, though.

But the media don't think so. In its January 3 edition, the Daily Yomiuri hailed the fact that "social networking sites bring people together" with a growing number of Japanese signing on to the SNS. According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, the SNS population had topped 7.16 million by March 2006 but by now Mixi, alone, has 6.6 million subscribers. And what on earth are these participants up to on the semi-closed cybercommunities? They are just socializing very nicely with each other because that's enough to "bring them together."

The DY took up a housewife as a showcase. She has written a "child-raising diary on the Net and made friends with other housewives in the neighborhood" without being disturbed by nasty trollers or any type of abusers. In short they are doing online what could be done offline. But that doesn't prevent the DY from being exhilarated because this is the surest way for them to tame, or neutralize, the potentially harmful SNS population.

Once upon a time, Japan was known to be the world's most closely-knit society. But now that the modern technologies have cut off all these ties lined with the myth of homogeneity, the Japanese people are desperately trying to restore the cohesiveness that existed among villagers in the good old days. The mainstream media favor, and are going to further encourage, the trend on the assumption that these people are ready to subordinate themselves to the media establishment. And in fact Japan's Netizens now look poised to settle for the second-class citizenship in the "fourth estate." · read more (986 words)

CONTINUED FROM INSTALMENT 2

Degree of Diversity

As I wrote in the above-linked piece, where the degree of diversity isn't high enough, you can't expect the people to use an innovative technology in an innovative way. This is especially true with "disruptive" technologies such as the one that has made the World Wide Web available to everyone on this side of the digital divide. Here, I will discuss diversity from that perspective.

Without doubt, the Americans are the champions in terms of racial diversity. They have almost looked obsessed with it in the last four decades. Their nation is often referred to as a racial melting pot. But just looking like one is not enough for a society to move on to an entirely new breed of socio-political system. It's cultural diversity that gives real impetus for the e-shift.

Let us face the fact that there always is the rule of chemistry governing the racial mix, or any collaboration among people from different backgrounds or with different traits. If you use a wrong recipe, as the Americans tend to do, you will possibly end up in a chaotic situation before they can bring their respective virtues together. I think that's how the Americans have failed to bring about a genuinely diverse society where people from all walks of life can cooperate with each other, instead of just "tolerate" each other.

To make the situation even worse for the American people, their obsession with diversity mostly stems from their sense of indebtedness toward the descendants of slaves and other victims of their past colonialism. When I say race doesn't matter, I simply mean race doesn't matter. But most white Americans hear me saying black or yellow people should be respected, as if these minority groups of people automatically deserve their respect just because they are black, or yellow. In such a self-deprecating way, they are destined to let another American century slip away very soon because obligatory tolerance and redemptive respect don't help much in the face of the enormous challenge before us today. In a fallout of this climate, we have seen the white and stupid movie director making a fortune from his book, "Stupid White Men."

In short, the Americans today are no longer the real champions of diversity. I used to admire them for their respect of differences. But not anymore. They are not only pursuing diversity in the wrong way, but also going so far as to elevate their obsession into a new religion, while what is badly needed is a new science to be called something like Social Chemistry that answers the most relevant questions of the times - how to network a wide variety of people and how to synergize their personal endeavors into one big momentum for social change. This constitues the formidable challenge facing the people of the U.S. today.

Despite the apparent failure in the American experiment, people still take it for granted that wherever "the West meets the East," something great that couldn't be expected otherwise, is brought to fruition. I'm afraid they are wrong, most of the time. When I was overseeing the entire administration at the Japanese subsidiary of a Swiss company, I had to summon my people to a meeting every time the inhouse software engineers delivered a goofy system to the "user department". Before the business-illiterate systems engineers and the systems-illiterate user representatives, I told them of my own empirical rule, which I named "Yamamoto's Multiplication Theory." The Power Point slide I showed them simply read: "Equation that doesn't apply here: 0.5 + 0.5 = 1.0, Equation that applies everywhere: 0.5 x 0.5 = 0.25." · read more (1,616 words)

Quo Vadis?

In Instalment 1 of this series, I wrote that the time is ripe for some advanced nations to move on to the leader-less state of society at least in theory, without specifying who they can be, and for what reasons. Now I will try to be a little more specific about what countries are the best poised for the era of cyber democracy, and what countries are the farthest from it.

And yet I don't want to play a tipster about who will be the first to reach there because the issue of e-governance is a little more serious matter than horse racing. I have tentatively concluded that Singapore, or any other country with a similar set of national attributes, is the closest to electronicizing its government. But there is a catch: the one who is the closest to the goal will not necessarily be the first to reach there. They often refer to this paradox as the irony of history.

In modern history we have seen this happen time and again. The Russian Revolution could transform overnight a state of peasantry into the world's first communist regime. And Japan could rise from reclusive feudalism to the world's second largest economy. So who knows which horse will be the first to cross the goal? The only thing we can tell is that whenever the most backward country overtakes advanced nations in leaps and bounds, it is doomed to suffer an acute setback sooner or later as was proven by Vladimir Putin's Russia or the post-bubble Japan.

To begin with, the order of arrival, as such, doesn't matter that much. In fact it's an inevitable, not just an advisable, course of action for every nation to go for the Internet because as we already know, not a single democracy has been doing well since the turn of the century. The democracy in the U.S. is a far cry from the Japan's political system. Unlike in Japan, the self-purification mechanism, the essential element of any type of democracy, still seems to be at work there, albeit falteringly. And yet, there's no denying that the United States is ailing at this moment and it looks to be suffering something more than a spell of hiccups. · read more (2,569 words)

Even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. (Martin Luther King, Jr., August 28, 1963)

According to the pedestrian interpretation of the word "Anarchy", it just means chaos. Etymologically, though, it denotes a ruler-less state of society. In this original sense of the word, I think the time is ripe for some advanced nations to move on to that state, at least in theory.

Experts in the history of social thought say anarchism branches out into a variety of schools ranging from Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's Mutualism to Mikhail Bakunin's Collective Anarchism. Admittedly, I owe the basic idea to these thinkers and activists. But if there is something that differentiates me from them, it's an anarchic political system which is viable only on the Internet. In that sense, what I'm advocating here is something to be called a "Networked Anarchy" that should be synonymous to the futuristic polity generically called e-Democracy, or e-Government.

I don't have any specific countries in mind. However, since any nation where the conventional democracy isn't at work can't move on to an e-Democracy, Japan, China and Koreas are precluded from the scope of my proposition. In Japan, for instance, the education system has collapsed, the election system has collapsed, diplomacy has collapsed, the pension plans have collapsed, and there's practically nothing that hasn't. For such a nation, there's no place to head for but hell. · read more (1,057 words)

From left to right: Y. Tanaka, S. Maehara w/ J. Koizumi, M. Fukushima, T. Kanzaki


Earlier this month Angela Merkel of Christian Democratic Union and Gerhard Schroeder of Social Democratic Party of Germany struck a deal to form a "grand coalition" after the election whose return was too close to call. The two parties were so divided over how to turn around the nation's ailing economy that it took them weeks to reach an agreement.

On the other hand in Japan, the Liberal Democratic Party headed by Junichiro Koizumi won a sweeping victory in the September 11 poll. Hence, on the part of the LDP there's no reason to seek a coalition with any other party than the old coalition partner, New Komeito. But it's a different story as far as the loser, the Democratic Party of Japan, is concerned.

Despite desperate efforts by former and current president of the DPJ to differentiate their party from the LDP, it's been more and more apparent that the DPJ is nothing more than a double of the LDP. Essentially we were seeing something little more than an infight between intra-party factions during the campaign period. · read more (1,082 words)

On August 8 the "Postal Reform Bills" were pronounced dead at the House of Councilors by the oppositions led by the Democratic Party of Japan and dissidents within the ruling Liberal Democratic Party who crossed the floor to vote against them. The triplet bills were four years old. (Some say they were almost thirteen years old since these inviable things first cropped up in their father's brain.)

The cause of the deaths is yet to be known for sure because the mainstream media have not issued the death certificates as yet.

But you don't need official certificates to know that they died just because they were so inviable as to be likened to phantoms.

The deaths are also attributable to the fact that this time the group of people with vested interest in the Japan Post, including its 270,000-plus employees, were, and still remain, fighting against another group of pork-barrel operators who have their vested interests somewhere else. · read more (675 words)

This is to follow up the January 31 TFP story titled "'Democracy' in Iraq, Ukraine, China and Japan".

On February 14 the Iraqi election committee announced the final results of the January 30 election. Although the overall turnout was lowered to 58% from the initial estimate of 70%, still nobody can deny it's quite something that some 8.5 million people showed up at poll stations defying terrorists' threat. Soon after the elections, U.S. President George W. Bush called world leaders to share his delight. He called Gerhard Schroder, Jacques Chirac, Tony Blair and Kofi Annan. But for obvious reasons he didn't bother to call up Junichiro Koizumi who considers the U.S. President his closest friend.

As the initial euphoria over the landmark event, that even infected the New York Times, wanes, some have resumed their same old business of second-guessing and failure-mongering. This is especially true with the Japanese journalism. · read more (344 words)

We could not make legible the diagram shown above due to technical and other reasons. But never mind, you don't have to try hard making out these party names to comprehend the Japan's political landscape since the early-1990s. It doesn't really matter which party merged with which party, how a party split up into how many parties, which lawmaker party-hopped from which to which, etc. And now the media have been spreading out an illusion that a two-party system like the one in the U.S. or the U.K. is now on the horizon with the DPJ (minshu-to) ostensibly extending its power. But as our friend Shintaro Ishihara always maintains, the DPJ is dominated by the remnants from a former intraparty faction of the LDP (jimin-to) that was headed by former prime minister Kakuei Tanaka (1972-1974). · read more (303 words)