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 …
Tag: LDP
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 …
Free fall
If there were any lingering doubts about the drop in the Abe Cabinet's popularity, the latest Yomiuri poll should dispel those — Yomiuri found that the government's popularity fell to 32.9%, and its unfavorable rating rose to 53.7%.It also confirmed the Asahi's finding that the LDP and DPJ are running even in electoral districts, and …
How to make Japan more beautiful with just 155 promises
The LDP has released its platform for next month's Upper House elections, 155 promises to build a beautiful country, society, livelihood, and furusato (not to mention "beautifully vigorous regions living in symbiosis with nature" [no. 52]).As the puerile overuse of the word beautiful [Ed. — At least it's not kawaii (cute); hey, kawaii kuni e …
Continue reading How to make Japan more beautiful with just 155 promises
Blair looks forward while looking back
I think it goes without saying that outgoing British Prime Minister Tony Blair will be recalled as a tragic figure, full of potential but consumed by circumstances largely beyond his control. (Check out the debate hosted by PostGlobal on this question.)Nevertheless, Blair remains impressive as a world leader who has tried to look forward and …
Reverting to form
The responses of both the LDP and the DPJ to the unfolding pensions scandal are illustrative, depressingly, of how little the Japanese political system has changed.The LDP's response has been nothing short of all-out panic. With Upper House elections little more than a month away, the LDP is trying to kill this issue as quickly …
Meet the new daijin, same as the old daijin
On Friday morning, Prime Minister Abe summoned forty-eight-year-old Akagi Norihiko to Kantei and requested that Akagi serve as Matsuoka Toshikatsu's successor at the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries (MAFF). Akagi, a Tokyo University graduate, MAFF old boy (OB), and grandson of an agriculture minister in the cabinet of Abe's grandfather Kishi, was first elected …
Continue reading Meet the new daijin, same as the old daijin
Tobias S. Harris 