View From The Couch - 18/Jun/2016

This Damned Election - This week's Edition

Sometime last year I reported that a bunch of academic types wanted to vote Green and they abandoned the ALP. I decided to see if that were still the case, and it turns out that it is not still the case. A lot of them have headed back to the ALP. I asked why they switched back and they said it was because Bill Shorten was making a better case for himself with the policies he's put up, and back then the ALP were being very coy about their policies that it drove them to despair. Now, they do not despair so much - which goes to show political support is indeed ephemeral.

I'm certain that the Coalition are terrible managers of the economy. So it goes without saying that the ALP should get the nod over the Coalition. If anything the purgatory for the ALP seems to have been too short to be in such a good position so soon after the defeating 2013. After all, they did make a big hash government. What's troubling is that people like Tony Burke who were instrumental in making a hash of it, are still around and bound to become a minister should the ALP win. That into say, even if the ALP win, this is going to be tough-to-stomach in the new government. Should the Coalition win, then well, we know it's going to be three more years of this unimaginable, unmitigated disaster that is government by stupidity ("of the, for the...stupid").

If there's one thing that's becoming clearer in this election, it is that we really aren't given a greatest setoff choices - and this lack of a good choice is necessarily so because we've made so many people who are undeserving of office into politicians. These professional politicians exist because politics has been seized upon as a career to have. This careerism in turn is precluding the depth and breadth of thinking required to really build this nation. Instead, we have the kind of people who think it's pretty damn cool to cash in long held government assets through privatisation, trying to find ever more silver to sell off. To what purpose? - we're told it is to cut the deficit.
You know, at a certain point incredulity kicks in. Which is sort of where we find ourselves.

Shintaro Ishihara Writes About Kakuei Tanaka

Shintaro Ishihara is the rightwing conservative everybody thinks Shinzo Abe is. Let's clear about this: there are people in China and South Korea who carry on like Shinzo Abe is going to re-militarise Japan into the war machine it once was, and start invading the peninsula and continent. It' a crock of shit because in the years Abe has been Prime Minister this time around, he's barely increased the JSDF budget. When you consider the oldImperial Army and Navy combined took 70% of the budget, 1% seems like not much an attempt to re-militarise.

The point is, Shintaro Ishihara, was the politician who would love to go back to a strong Japan. He certainly was right up until the moment he retired. After all, he wrote the book "The Japan That Can Say No". Anyway... Shintaro Ishihara came to political prominence back in the late 70s as being anti-corruption and therefore anti-Kakuei Tanaka within the LDP of Japan. Now he has a bestseller that is a novel about Tanaka, but written in the fist person. A sort of imaginary auto-biography. The title is 'Genius'. In it, he goes into loving detail of Kakuei and his convictions.

It's a slight volume and covers the terrain we all know very well. If anything we don't learn much from it except for the fact that Ishihara seems to have turned the corner on his appreciation for, and appraisal of his old political foe. He really means it without irony when he calls Kakuei Tanaka, a  kind of political genius and visionary. Which is pretty strange.

Kakuei was a card, and did have a big-picture view of Japan. I don't know if that qualifies him as a genius - but the book certainly is interesting. As an attempt at polishing a turd goes, it showed Ishihara has quite the intellectual stamina for such a task.

In case you might have forgotten the kind of character Kakuei Tanaka was, here's my entry on how he advised his runners to deliver bribes.

Warriors Past

Restoration Of What Exactly?

Before I get into today's entry, I just want to say I can't stand the right wing nationalists in Japan. They drive around town in their black vans blaring their slogans and World War II era tunes that sound *terrible* through the megaphone speakers mounted on the roof. They create a commotion on crowded streets and really at their core, they're just nothing but nostalgists in denial.

So, when 80 year old Shintaro Ishihara goes into a national election in Japan forming a team with the Osaka mayor Toru Hashimoto and his Japan Restoration party, one can't help but get a little suspicious of this so-called third force in politics. Indeed, in most modern (and post-modern and post-post-modern) democracies, the experience has been that the third force is invariably fascist, and conservatives are always conned into thinking fascists are the better allies than the old adversary, the progressives.

That's how Hitler and the Nazis snuck by the deteriorating Hindenburg, and brought about the end of the Weimar Republic. I dare say the rise of the Tea Party on the back of sloganeering idiocy of the likes of Sarah Palin tells you just enough that there really isn't much of a difference between the methods of the Nazis and the Tea Party. History tells us the third force is a collection of crackpots trying to disrupt the orthodoxy of the polity for its radical agenda.

In Shintaro Ishihara, we can see a man who is nostalgic for the kind of Japan that was a military power in the first half of the Twentieth Century, and it's an uncomfortable sort of nostalgia because it means he has to line up with those morons in the black vans and their megaphones. Any person with a modicum of sanity and good sense would stay away from that mob, but alas no, Ishihara wants to get  third party going with the express hope of confronting Communist China.

This bring me to this column by Peter Hartcher today.

Hashimoto and Ishihara are taking advantage of a growing disenchantment among Japan's voters with either of the major parties. But China, through its nationalist assertiveness, might be providing them with a new purpose and platform.

It would be a profound historical blunder if Beijing's decision to energise and enlarge its territorial claims turns out to have not only alarmed its neighbours and reinvigorated US commitment to the region - it has already managed to achieve these unintended consequences - but to have remilitarised its historical enemy Japan as well.

The Japanese people favour their current constitution and oppose nuclear armament. But China is giving the neonationalists an opening and they are taking it.

In the 1980s, the first prime minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, once counselled against then-prevalent 1980s complaints against Japan's commercial success.

''The Japanese are good merchants but they are better warriors,'' he said. And he didn't think Japan's underlying warrior prowess was dead, only dormant. China should be careful it does not push its neighbours too far.

Those ghosts of the warriors are never too far away; and if you are Japanese, there's something deathly compelling about some of the symbols.

Why, even today in the Sankei Newspaper, they are celebrating the last 'operational'  Zero Fighter.

It's exactly the kind of symbolism that stirs the hearts of nostalgists. I should know - it stirs something in me! And I'm not a nationalist - but I am a historian.