On 12 sept. 07, at 21:50, Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> On Sep 12, 2007, at 8:42 AM, Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:
>
>> Surprise news, Abe has abruptly announced today he'd quit. There was
>> a press conference around 2pm Tokyo time.
>
> I knew he was in trouble but was never clear on why. What's the
> problem?
Koizumi left less than 12 months ago with a huge popularity rate, a huge majority in the lower house and a comfortable one in the higher one.
Abe started with a cabinet of close "friends", not reflecting the current relations of power between the clans in the LPD and was going to start a lot of "reforms" with a big focus on a rewriting of the constitution (the one that has been "forced upon the people of Japan" by the US, or so goes the myth here). With that came a reform of the education bill with a strong emphasis on patriotism, morals etc.
Everything was going relatively smoothly when suddenly the scandal of the pension records surfaced.
The pension system has been totally overhauled a few years ago and to save money a lot of subcontracting took place to digitalize the system.
People who know a little bit about Japanese characters know how complex reading and writing is, so what happened is that a huge number of people got their names input with the wrong readings or other similar mistakes. This combining to the utter complexity of older pension system, relying not on a national system but on a company based system for most workers, and the result was that 50,000,000 records (you read well: fifty millions) appeared to have been badly registered in the new systems. When such people started to claim their pensions the administration paid them based on the wrong records and even with proof that the administration had been wrong, the rule was that some information was to old to serve as proof.
That was the beginning of the end. It took Abe a little too long to consider that a national priority and his ratings started to take a dive.
At the same time, a number of his cabinet members started a series of gaffes, like the minister of health in charge of day care systems that says (no kidding) that women are machines to give birth and the birth rate problem could be easily solved if all the women in age of having kids took their responsibility etc.
Plus financial scandals that had half a dozen of his cabinet members resign for corruption issues, and all that right before the upper house election.
The result was an overwhelming victory of the main opposition party (DPJ) last month. The constitution in Japan is such that the upper house can't really oppose a decision of the lower house, it takes time, a lot of time and it is not politically very efficient. But there was a new issue going to be discussed in the next few days: the Japanese involvement in refueling US ships headed for wherever.
When this wherever is support to operations in Afghanistan then there is less of a problem, but is has slowly dawned on people here that maybe the refueling was also for ships that were supporting operations in Iraq, from where Japan left a little while ago. And that was going to become a big thing since Japan was not supposed to do anything with Iraq now that it was not there. There was no legal basis for such operations. When Bush publicly thanked Japan for refueling ships that were working in Iraq, and that only a few days ago only, that was the beginning of the end of the lie.
The law that rules Japanese marine forces refueling operations was going to expire in a few weeks and it would have been very easy for the DPJ to slow the adoption of an extension law so that in the end it is not adopted within the current session calendar.
Plus, the new cabinet Abe choose after the election happened to have a few ministers with significant financial problems, resulting in the agriculture minister resigning after one week, and, last but not least, it just appeared in the newspapers a few days ago that the pension system had been abused by some members of the administration (local or national) pretty since the beginning of the 60'... Of course, both pension scandals are related, especially in the fact that _every_ politician knew about what was going on but all the cabinets did everything they could to hide the truth. Which is the reason it was so easy to have on TV the precise list of all the localities where officials had taken money form the system and when that had happened.
It looks like the media has not been very nice to Abe and its cabinet, maybe because they're just too liberal and did not feel like his "beautiful Japan" (that's what he called his "vision") was what Japan needed at the moment.
Osawa (the leader of DPJ) expected some tough fighting in the houses and I am sure he based his strategy on the fact that Abe systematically refused any compromise even within its own party (at least until recently). I have no idea what is going on next but I would never have thought Japanese politics could be that fun to watch...
I'm sure there will be more things to read in the Japan Times or other English language Japanese newspapers. I'll see if I find interesting links.
Jean-Christophe