View From The Couch - 20/Jul/2022

40.3c In London

It sounds like it was worse than just bad. 

The UK has experienced scorching heat like it never has before, and it is causing all sorts of problems in a country built for cool, drizzly weather.  

For the first time since records began, temperatures reached 40 degrees Celsius in the country, peaking at 40.3C at Coningsby, a small village in England's Midlands.
It is about 1.6 degrees warmer than the last hottest day recorded, 38.7C in Cambridge in July 2019. 

A new record was also set in Wales on Monday when the maximum reached 37.1C, beating a previous high of 35.2C, while Scotland topped its previous hottest temperature of 32.9C set in 2003, by reaching 34.8C at Charterhall on Tuesday.

The place is not built for this kind of heat. The footage of the fires outside London looked every bit as spectacular as the fires during the Black Summer down here in 2019. 

The grim reality of this heat wave is that you can sheet ALL of it to Global Warming, and it happens the way it did because we spent the last three decades voting in leaders who were in the pockets of the fossil fuel lobby. 

And here we are. What can I say but, Told. You. So. 

Shinzo Abe, Bogey Man Even In Death  

Look, I really like Peter Hartcher's reporting and writing for the SMH. But this one had me scratching my head. 

Abe didn’t wait for formal revision of the constitution. He took a series of incremental steps. He increased the budget of Japan’s so-called Self Defence Forces. He broke the longstanding cap that held defence spending below 1 per cent of GDP to today stand at 1.1 per cent. He commissioned the conversion of two warships into aircraft carriers.
He pushed through parliament a law that allows Japan’s military to operate with US forces and those of other allies, including Australia. And he took the lead in the democratic world’s response to Beijing’s aggression with three policy innovations.

Yeah okay. Then Hartcher lists three ways in which Shinzo Abe tried to confront Xi's China, only to admit that Anthony Albanese is about to do the same kinds of things just to keep Australia secure against China's encroachment. 

Abe proposed that Japan consider sharing with the US responsibility for the “nuclear umbrella” that protects US allies. And he said that any “Taiwan crisis” would also be a “Japan crisis”. This was an encouragement to Japan to commit to the defence of Taiwan against any mainland Chinese aggression. 

Prosperity and pacifism seem no longer enough for the Japan of today. Increasingly, Japan is contemplating active defence of liberty and a liberal world order. More than any other Japanese leader, Abe has brought the country to this point. And Japan’s “martial qualities”? The ambitions of Xi Jinping’s China seem likely to test them anew.

I can't come at that closing paragraph. There's been this view that Shinzo Abe's time in power was all about remilitarising. This is hardly the case. Japan lifted its defence budget to over 1% of GDP, all the way up to 1.1%. Shock! Horror! Germany is moving to 2% and nobody's suggesting Germany's going back to the 1940s. It's not like Japan is suddenly capable of  - what, invading China? Bombing Pearl Harbour? Darwin? It couldn't be further from the facts on the ground. 

Shinzo Abe was in power for the longest period for as long as they hav had Prime Ministers in modern Japan going back to 1868. He did not bring a single draft for the rewrite of the constitution to the constitutional review committee, let alone the floor of the Diet for debate. He might have said he wanted to change the Peace Constitution but he hardly ever followed through on anything resembling what people feared he would do - and he had ample time and opportunity to do so but did no such thing. 

Now that the book is closed, I think we should get rid of these notions that Abe was about remilitarising Japan. It makes good copy for the Herald to sell their rag, but it sure sucks as writing about the history that we just lived through.

 

More On The Killing Of Shinzo Abe

Picking Up The Pieces

The picture we are getting about the slayer of Shinzo Abe is in some ways rather strange. From the first note that the perpetrator claimed his killing of Abe was not political, through to the alleged findings where he fired off a home made shotgun, to how he was making other guns from common parts found from hardware stores, all add to a very peculiar picture of a perhaps very sick man. This isn't your Lee Harvey Oswald claiming to be a patsy, this isn't even Sirhan Sirhan. It's more Travis Bickle from 'Taxi Driver'. 

Then again not all killings of men of history are the same. In the aftermath of an assassination you might feel bad about the lost potential - but Abe had probably fulfilled his historic mission already. This isn't about lost potential. And yet there is something very troubling - if anything what's most troubling about the killing of Shinzo Abe is that it wasn't really political at all, and thus fails to be an assassination - it is simply murder by a deranged madman. And if that is the case, we cannot ever find proper meaning to his passing. And maybe that's the point of the reportage. 

That's all to one side. Yet the whole episode demands we dig a bit deeper. More on that later. There may be a blatantly political reason why the police did not identify the organisation that is the target of the perpetrator's fury. 

Just for some context, I've also had discussions about political assassinations in Japan with some people. I myself have a distant relative who was a party too this thing here. My maternal; grandmother's great uncle was one of the 17 men from Mito who teamed up with the man from Satsuma Jizaemon Arimura. This is the guy, if you can read Japanese. After he was executed, he was later enshrined in Yasukuni. That's right. The Meiji government figured that the assassination of the Tairo Ii Naosuke was a patriotic act. That's the same Yasukuni shrine to which Shinzo Abe used to go for visits.   

So it's not like I'm personally holding to any kind of belief that political violence is completely foreign to the Japanese. However things have to be put into some perspective. 

The Meiji restoration essentially put an end to the Edo period, and with it went the Samurai. This essentially put an end to politics through violence from the general population. However, political violence carried out by military officers took their place, and Japan was plagued by political violence through the 1930s which led to World War II. It's really the end of World War II that brought about the current era where the average Japanese person is a peaceful pert, and political violence is unimaginable.

Gun laws are strict in Japan so any political violence this side of 1945 has involved blades or blunt instruments or hand-to-hand assaults. There was a prime minister who was assaulted with an ash tray in 1980. Gun violence is absolutely exceptional to ordinary life in Japan. And so to understand the outlier quality of this killer, you have to understand that somebody in this context where gun laws are strict, went and built their own guns to circumvent gun laws, and walked up to a political candidate on the street and opened fire. Does this really count as political violence of the same kind as the ones before World War II? If so, then just what the hell does this event portend? 

We can't know, because we can't understand the thinking the madman who pulled the trigger. Or is this some new kind of bullshit we've not really categorised? You can see right there that information control is letting the narrative move towards this being an act of a madman. 

What Was The Organisation The Perpetrator Hated?

All the same, it's starting to leak out slowly that the unnamed special organisation that was hated by the perpetrator is the Unification Church, a.k.a. the Moonies. The perpetrator Tetsuya Yamagami is claiming his family was sent bankrupt by a religious organisation, and somehow Abe was giving this organisation support. A little googling reveals Shinzo Abe was tightly linked with the Unification Church through political donations that came from the church. More importantly, his grandfather Nobusuke Kishi was instrumental in bringing the Unification Church to Japan from Korea as part of his anti-communist stance. It is no surprise that Abe himself who inherited his grandfather's political apparatus through his father was well connected to the money from the Unification Church.

Was he a believer? Likely not. Shinzo Abe was a believer in whatever the hell form of Shinto that takes place at the Yasukuni Shrine. He spent a lot of political capital shoring up that one so it's hard to believe that he was also a closet Moonie. What is becoming apparent is that Abe and his faction took money from the Moonies, and in turn he offered his own support to them. He delivered some speech via video link to one of the Moonies' group wedding events and Donald Trump no less was also sending videos to this event. The speculation is running that Trump is closely aligned with the Moonies in America, and so, Abe was able to move closer to Trump upon his election through the Unification Church channels.

Money and politics have a way of going in hand. For a political party to look to a source for funding is par for the course (they literally make these deals on the golf courses). The traditional way this went in Japanese politics was through a 'General Construction Industrial Complex' that funnelled money into the LDP and then the LDP would parcel out general construction jobs from government. This old style landed quite a number of LDP politicians in prison in the 70s, 80s and 90s. As the 'GCIC' waned, so did its contributions. As the LDP went through a reformation in the mid to late 90s, it seems inevitable that they opened themselves up to religious organisations donating money to replace the GCIC. 

In the case of Shinzo Abe, it appears that he was very open to taking money from the Unification Church because of his family's own history in inviting them into Japan, but also a vague similarity in stated world views. Who doesn't want world peace as a stated objective? It's this kind of banal rhetoric that characterised Abe's speeches (and also invited much derision as if he was a retard). It is not irony or coincidence then that just as his grandfather Nobusuke Kishi was the target of an assassination attempt, he too had become a target.

What is kind of terrifying is that Abe's second government - as early as Feb 2014 - was accused of letting the influence of the Unification Church into Cabinet. By 2019, he was being accused that the separation of Church and State was being blurred by having so many Cabinet members who had some kind of organisational involvement with the Unification Church. And this is no ordinary denomination of Christianity - let's be blunt, it's a cult from South Korea. The cult is highly exploitative and Yamagami's leaked statement says his family lost everything to this cult. If Abe was going to endorse this church, Yamagami explained he was fair game for his grudge. The greater irony is that Yamagami himself doesn't think his act is a political act. He has expressly said his murder wasn't about politics. That might be true in his mind, but unravelling all this shows it was totally, entirely, political. 

This means it wasn't just murder, it really was an assassination. I'm wondering if at a future date, Tetsuya Yamagami is going to be identified as a patriot and get enshrined at Yasukuni. Now that, would be ironic. 

View From The Couch - 08/Jul/2022

Shinzo Abe (21/09/1954 - 08/07/2022)

An assassin walked up to the former Prime Minister of Japan as he was delivering a speech and let off 2 shots. Mr Abe was taken to a hospital but died form his wounds there. The assassin Tetsuya Yamagami was arrested on the spot. He is allegedly an ex-Maritime Self Defence Serviceman. The shotgun used was allegedly hand made. He has been interrogated by police and so far has offered that he did not do it because of political beliefs or convictions. More news to come.

People have been messaging me for an opinion and to be honest, I don't really have one. If Shinzo Abe was not assassinated for his political beliefs, then he must have been killed over a personal beef which we cannot fathom right now. If anything, of all the Japanese politicians, he might have been the most likely to Abe assassinated for his political beliefs, in as much as he was vilified for a lot of strange things during his long tenure as Prime Minister the second time around. 

The image of Shinzo Abe differs greatly from inside Japan compared to the rest of the world To the rest of the world, he was the affable yet staunch supporter of liberal democracy, who tirelessly met with many foreign leaders and kept the liberal democracies focused on their joint security. The tributes pouring in from world leaders are an indication of just how energetically he represented Japan and this notion of liberal democracies. Albanese, Turnbull, Scomo, Kevin Rudd all offered tributes, as have Jacinda Ardern, Boris Johnson, Tsai Ing-wen, and Nerandra Modi. The picture emerges of an active participant in global processes such as the G7 and G20.

In Japan, however, he's seen more as a throwback to an older style of politics. He is from a political dynasty of Liberal Democrats. His forebears were Prime Ministers, his father was a senior LDP politician, and his brother is currently a senior LDP politician as well. There is this unrelenting feel of nepotism, entitlement, and money-politics all entwined in the classic LDP manner. Perhaps this is why people sought to frame him as corrupt, but at the same time, none of the alleged scandals really turned up any real dirt. It was more image than substance, and the image was possibly couched in terms of an older politics from the days of his forebears. 

The fear had always been he is government would somehow re-write the 'Peace Constitution' of Japan and turn it back into a fully militarist war mongering nation. The people who accused him of these plans never really found the evidence that he was doing such things. In the 8year 9 months in power the second time, he did no re-write the constitution. This may partly be because he seemed to spend an inordinate time defending himself from the suggestion that maybe his influence as Prime Minister might have been fraudulently mis-used by a friend of his wife to obtain public land to build some school.

The point is, he was hardly the militarist everybody feared him to be. If he ever really were one, he was all talk. Instead he went around the world shoring up the flagging fortunes of liberal democracies and kept working towards things like the Quad. As it turned out, he was decidedly a lot more interested in security than conquest. All this internationalism and concern for global security was maybe rare coming from a modern Japanese Prime Minister, but in that sense he redefined Japan's role in the world through better diplomacy. 

And then he resigned. The last 2 and a half years of living through the pandemic made his presence a lot lighter, paler and less defined. Shinzo Abe ultimately embodied the best and worst aspects of politics in modern Japan. Perhaps then it is unsurprising that his demise comes from the barrel of a hand-made gun, fired by an ex-MSDF, non-political assassin (if such thing is even possible). The contradictory strangeness and preposterousness of his assassin oddly befits the complicated persona of his political life. Yet the plaudits are correct. Democracy and globalism lost a champion today. 

Senseless In Davos

Where Rhetoric Goes To Die (But Where Bastardry Thrives)

This forum going on in Davos is a bit of a joke. A few days ago Shinzo Abe got up and said his visits to the Yasukuni Shrine was to pray for world peace. If you overlook how disingenuous this is, sure, why not? Except all it did was provoke storm of protests form the governments of China and South Korea who like it or not have made it an industry to complain about the alleged re-militarisation of Japan. And so the Chinese have been on a diplomatic offensive everywhere telling every world newspaper what a threat Japan is to world peace. Which of course taken in a vacuum might look that way but as with Shinzo Abe and his disingenuous-ness, the Chinese are building Aircraft carriers and unilaterally declaring  airzones in their favour.

Let's be bluntly honest. The Chinese themselves are the biggest threats to world peace full stop, without comparing them to Japan. So if you overlook that glaring fact, then maybe Shinzo Abe's visit to a war memorial looks provocative. I'm not sure the Chinese sales pitch is working, even in Africa. After all, it's not like Japan's been to any kind of conflict, let alone war for nearing on 70years while China's happily had war action in every decade since World War II ended. The Korean War, the land war with the USSR, The invasion of Vietnam in the 70s not to mention the various oppressive things they are doing to their ethic populations in Tibet, Inner Mongolia, Manchuria and to the Uighurs.

So there's that. But the clincher might be the fact that for any person complaining about the Yasukuni Shrine housing Class 'A' war criminals from the Tokyo Tribunals, nobody can name all the names. They just say, "Class 'A' War Criminals" like there's some universal understanding of what that means. Most of them wouldn't know who Justice Webb was, nor would they understand what Keenan and Pal had to say after the trial about the Tokyo Trials.

Be that as it may, we're going to keep hearing about these visits. Here's the vexing thing. Japanese Prime Ministers since Junichiro Koizumi have eschewed going to the Yasukuni Shrine. That's dating back to 2006 or so. Since then, the first go around for Shinzo Abe, Yasuo Fukuda, Taro Aso, Yukio Hatoyama, and Naoto Kan, have come and gone without attending the Shrine and you can't say they got any slack from the Chinese or the South Koreans. It's been a noisy chorus of complaint regardless. Its not surprising that Shinzo Abe decided he may as well serve himself and his constituency by visiting if there wasn't going to be any merit in not going. The complaining - for all its pseudo-historic self-righteous legitimisation - is gratuitous.

Tony Abbott - Asshole Representative

By now it is clear that Tony Abbott's essential style is 'thrower of artless haymakers'. This week he got up in Davos to try and sheet home the blame of the Australian Government debt to the ALP and threw their record under the bus. It doesn't matter that it's not the done thing when you represent your country. It doesn't stop him from behaving like a prat. It doesn't matter that his characterisation of that recent history is totally at odds with how the rest of the world understood the GFC or how much they would like to swap their problems for ours. It doesn't matter that he comes over like a jerk - he's used to that, he doesn't even notice any more - and that it subtracts from the sum total of Australia's credibility for voting him in. That's right. He really doesn't care. If he went there as an individual to speak bullshit, that just reflects badly on him. Unfortunately as Prime Minister, his Bullshit speak makes us all look incredibly stupid.

Yet, he's our man in Davos. The more I think about it, I think our political class has collectively flown into the twilight zone of good sense or simply into a post-modern simulacrum of politics and not real politics at all. Pleaides was threatening to destroy his computer in furious protest at Tony Abbott's choice of general Cosgrove as the next Governor General, but really Tony Abbott's just meeting expectations of being the pits. And just as the whole thing reflects badly on Australia, it reflects badly on the Coalition that they think this is their man to lead the nation. So far, he's a bust.

It was reported Tony Abbott met with Shinzo Abe, and they didn't discuss whaling as an issue. This upset the Greens back home. After all, how could Tony Abbott not bring up the most symbolic issue that exists between Australia and Japan? Quite easily it seems. Tony Abbot claims they mostly talked about the TPP, trade and security. In the most ironic of ways, it actually makes sense. Why bring up whaling and make thing unpleasant? That being said, I find it incredibly hard to imagine Tony Abbott bringing up a topic that is not close to his heart at all and arguing a robust case on its behalf. Whatever he is, he is not that good a politician.

Dissing Jakarta From Afar

The even more peculiar thing about the Abbott Government so far is how it has mishandled the relationship with Indonesia so badly, to the point where we ought not be surprised should a shooting engagement erupt on the high seas between our navies.

The worst provocation would have been this business of sending back the asylum seekers in boats. To do this, the Australian Navy had to sail into Indonesian waters without permission. Immigration Minister Scott Morrison fronted the media and claimed that the Australian Navy might have "inadvertently" entered Indonesian waters.  Now, I don't know about you, but I don't see how that makes our navy look good when our Immigration Minister uses being lost as an excuse for being somewhere where they probably should not have been.

Jakarta's in a huff and they're buying more military hardware. They're buying F-16s fro America and 8 submarines from Russia. All because we provoked them with our navy, unilaterally sending back asylum seekers in boats; and in turn, this was because this government came to power on the stupid slogan "stop the boats" so they had to be seen to be doing it (otherwise they would be seen  to have broken a promise).

If you thought Shinzo Abe was a bit of a dummy incurring the complaints from China and South Korea for having visited the Yasukuni Shrine, he's got nothing on Tony Abbott.

News That's Fit To Punt - 18/Dec/2012

Shinzo Abe Wins In Japan

Predictably, the Democrats lost in Japan to the Liberal Democrats in the election on Sunday. now that the dust has cleared, there's a lot of talk about how this is a hard move to the right. The DPJ were not only kicked out, they were more decimated to about one sixth of representation. in the landslide, the 'Restoration Party' also picked up a bunch of seats in the lower house, putting them at about equal footing with the DPJ, while the Social democrats got smashed to two seats. The end for Prime Minster was more crash-and-burn than going out in style.

What's got my interest right now more than all this talk of Japan might be turning hard to the right is the notion that Shinzo Abe wants to challenge the Bank of Japan to do the kind of Quantitative Easing in the style of Ben Bernanke and the US Federal Reserve.

Mr Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) won a landslide victory on Sunday, securing a two-thirds "super-majority" in the Diet with allies that can override senate vetoes.

Armed with a crushing mandate, Mr Abe said he would "set a policy accord" with the Bank of Japan for a mandatory inflation target of 2 per cent, backed by "unlimited" monetary stimulus.

"It's very rare for monetary policy to be the focus of an election. We campaigned on the need to beat deflation, and our argument has won strong support. I hope the Bank of Japan accepts the results and takes an appropriate decision," he said.
The menace behind his words did not have to be spelled out. He has already threatened to change the Bank of Japan’s governing law if it refuses to comply.

"An all-out attack on deflation is on its way," said Jesper Koll, Japanese equity chief at JPMorgan.

Mr Abe plans to empower an economic council to "spearhead" a shift in fiscal and monetary strategy, eviscerating the central bank’s independence.

The council is to set a 3 per cent growth target for nominal GDP, embracing a theory pushed by a small band of "market monetarists" around the world.

Which, when you think about it is pretty enticing.  It's certainly a return to Keynsian economic thinking, and something I've been wondering for some years now. Japan was actually coming out of the lost decade around  2007 when the GFC kicked in, and since then, asset deflation has hit growth pretty hard. More to the point, if there's one nation that could have printed more money in the last 20years,it was Japan.

Now, there are reasons the Bank of Japan hasn't simply printed money, and this is because the property bubble came about because there was so much cash flying around the economy, looking for places to be invested; and under the old hyper regulated markets of Japan, inevitably found their way to real estate which led to the Bubble. Since then of course there's been a whole lot of deregulation. It may work better now that there has been all this deregulation that has happened since 1990.

This next bit also got my attention:

"Any meaningful sell-off in the JGBs could trigger a serious problem in Japan’s banking system. The holdings of JGBs by Japanese banks account for 900pc of their Tier I capital," he said. Better the Devil you know.

Professor Richard Werner from Southampton University, author of Princes of the Yen, said the Bank of Japan is to blame for the country's failure to shake off its financial crisis in the early 1990s and for two Lost Decades of perma-slump that have followed. He accused the bank of dragging its feet at every stage, forcing governments to rely on huge fiscal deficits instead.

This tight-money/loose fiscal mix has pushed public debt to 240 per cent of GDP. The country would have been better served if the bank had stopped the rot immediately by flooding the money supply to kickstart lending. "It has taken 20 years and the Fed's Ben Bernanke to show them how to do it."

"Mr Abe has the right intentions but the Bank of Japan knows how to put up a fight. After watching the glacial moves in Japan for over 20 years - often in the wrong direction - I want to see the details before being sure that something really big is happening," he said.

You can just see the successor to Shirakawa - whoever it's going to be - would want to put up a big fight with Abe. Now, I don't know about you, but it seems to me that if one sector in Japan has made lots of money since the Bubble, it's actually the banks. Banks everywhere seem to thrive a lot better when interest rates are lower, and the banks in Japan have been able to grow steadily in spite of the low growth economy for quite some years now. So, rocking the boat and printing money may actually be something the banks would like. The Bank of Japan claiming it's been holding off inflation seems to have been way off the mark for most of the time since the Bubble burst.

No More Of Tanaka In Niigata Ward 5

Daughter of former Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka, Makiko Tanaka lost her seat to Tadayoshi Nagashima of the LDP. The interesting thing about that is that it happened in Niigata where the name of Kakuei Tanaka brings awe (and graft money by the truckload). Some of you might know this but the man who deposed her is the former mayor of Yamakoshi village that suffered greatly from an Earthquake earlier in the decade, and led the recovery of that village for years.

I met Mr. Nagashima when he came out to Sydney for the Japanese Film Festival. He is a career politician in many ways, but he did it from the ground up. He's not one of those people who come from dynastic families of politicians, unlike Makiko Tanaka, who is the epitome of that problem. Whatever Makiko Tanaka might say, she lost to a man who knew the electorate and understood how to do elections there. Talk about an end of an era that dates back to the mid 1950s.

Good Riddance, I say.