Working in the office of a Japanese Dietman and watching Japan's "sausage-making" process has been valuable in a number of ways — many of which I have documented here one way or another — but one lesson that I have left largely unmentioned is my renewed appreciation for the American political system.No political system is …
Tag: Japanese democracy
In Abe’s Japan, everything’s fine
At the LDP website, it's 大丈夫 time. (For non-Japanese readers, the word is daijyoubu, and it means essentially "everything's fine" or "all right" — try saying it like a surfer dude.)On the main page, overlaid over a picture of cool-biz Abe with a gentle sky-blue background, are links to campaign materials that inform readers that …
Buying the hype?
Michael Auslin, a history professor at Yale and soon to be scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, has a somewhat challenging survey of contemporary Japan at American.com, AEI's online magazine.As the article's title — "A Beautiful Country" — suggests, Auslin buys into the confident rhetoric that has emanated from Tokyo in recent years, but at …
Death of the 1955 system? Greatly exaggerated.
With Prime Minister Abe turning his attention and blame to the hapless bureaucrats in the Social Insurance Agency — those bureaucrats who have served as the fly in his constitution revision ointment — the Japan Times published a piece by Philip Brasor discussing the actual conditions within the agency, and the bureaucrats who lorded over …
Continue reading Death of the 1955 system? Greatly exaggerated.
The Japanese art of campaigning
Yesterday I finally made it to see Soda Kazuhiro's acclaimed documentary Senkyo [rendered in English as Campaign], in which he followed a university friend, Yamauchi Kazuhiko, as he campaigned as the LDP candidate for a city council seat in Kawasaki, Kanagawa Prefecture. (The film's official site can be viewed here.)Filmed with one camera and lacking …
Looking at the big picture
The LDP-Komeito coalition, after weeks of wrangling with the DPJ, passed its version of a law revising the Political Funds Control Law over DPJ opposition.The law stipulates that politicians' fund management organizations are to copy and provide receipts for expenditures above ¥50,000. Will it make any difference in stopping political corruption? In a word, no. …
The pensions fiasco and the crumbling LDP
Chris Salzberg of Global Voices Online provides the best single roundup of the widening pensions scandal I've seen. Every day brings new twists to this scandal, and Salzberg does a public service by assembling the story into some coherent narrative, with a healthy dollop of quotations from the Japanese blogosphere.The most striking thing about this …
"Post Abe" comes early
Ampontan — aka the yarase blogger — appears to have abandoned Abe Shinzo for...Foreign Minister Aso Taro.At least that's what I conclude from this love letter he wrote to Aso yesterday.Is there any serious likelihood of Aso ascending to the premiership in the wake of a disastrous LDP performance next month? A commentator ("AC") on …
Reading the proverbial tea leaves
In light of the new Asahi poll showing that the DPJ has expanded its lead in the proportional representation races for the Upper House, 29% to 23%, it is interesting to consider Shisaku's discussion of whether a Lower House election is also possible this year.Now, I don't disagree with his conclusion: "damnably unlikely." With its …
Japan’s values void
Harold James, a remarkably erudite historian at Princeton and author of The End of Globalization: Lessons from the Great Depression, has a piece at Project Syndicate entitled "The Return of 'Asian' Values," in which he discusses Fujiwara Masahiko's The Dignity of the State (previously discussed here).While James raises interesting questions about the foundations of capitalism, …
Tobias S. Harris 