Despite widespread expectations that he would not survive to lead the DPJ into this year's general election, Ozawa Ichiro's resignation is reverberating around the Japanese political system.Aso Taro, commenting on the Ozawa's resignation, claimed that he could not understand why Ozawa would resign now, two days before the debate scheduled between the party leaders. It …
Continue reading How severe is the fallout from Ozawa’s fall?
Curzon at Coming Anarchy looks at a couple recent statements by DPJ officials and concludes that the DPJ suffers from cognitive dissonance.He also suggests that I believe that the Obama administration plans to create an alliance "focused solely on joint security declarations." If he read my post on the subject more carefully, he'd notice I …
Hold the debate, indeed.Naturally Ozawa Ichiro's top aide had to get himself arrested the day I wrote 1,000 words on what kind of leader Ozawa would be as a prime minister.Jun Okumura has the details here.In brief, Ozawa's aide has been accused of receiving funds for one of Ozawa's political support groups from Nishimatsu Construction, …
The Aso government won a small victory on Friday when the lower house passed the 2009 budget, ensuring that even if the upper house does not act on it the budget will pass into law before the start of the new fiscal year.The discussion will now unavoidably shift to the timing of the general election. …
As 2008 enters its final week, the LDP and Aso Taro, its beleaguered head, are being written off as doomed in the year to come.No one, it seems, is willing to offer an explanation for how the LDP can save itself in a general election. The LDP may yet win the general election, but its …
"SOCIAL ENTROPY: A measure of the natural decay of the structure or of the disappearance of distinctions within a social system. Much of the energy consumed by a social organization is spent to maintain its structure, counteracting social entropy, e.g., through legal institutions, education, the normative consequences or television." – Krippendorff's Dictionary of CyberneticsThe LDP …
In a vitriolic post at Shisaku, MTC goes after those who insist that despite the LDP's current crisis — which has only gotten worse since back in January when Fukuda Yasuo called it the worst since the LDP's founding — the LDP will recover as it has done before.I have encountered this argument all too …
Asahi has published a long article illustrating the feeling of crisis that has descended upon the LDP, especially following Aso Taro's disastrous showing in the latest Nikkei poll (discussed here).After months of building, it appears that the dissolution of the LDP may finally be in motion.The LDP can be roughly divided into three broad groupings, …
Continue reading Conservatives, Clientelists, and Koizumians
A new Nikkei-TV Tokyo poll conducted at the end of November found that Prime Minister Aso Taro's approval rating is in free fall.According to the poll, Mr. Aso's approval rating fell seventeen points to 31%, while his disapproval rating rose nineteen points to 62%. Twice as many respondents oppose the government's plan for a new …
Aso Taro has arrived in Washington for the G20 summit on the global economic crisis.He leaves behind a country tottering on the brink of ruin. The OECD has announced that, like the reappearance of cancer after remission, Japan may once again experience deflation in 2009. Consumer confidence is at a record low. The question on …
Tobias S. Harris 