Note: On a nearly daily basis, the Shingetsu News Agency delivers by email Dateline Tokyo, our series of short reports on major news developments in Japan, to SNA Patrons of the Samurai Tier or higher. Some days later, we make these reports publicly available.

September 15, 2020

Yoshihide Suga Rises to the Nation’s Top Office

SNA (Tokyo) — Yoshihide Suga has been elected president of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and will soon become prime minister of Japan.

As expected, the presidential race was a walkover, with Suga, backed by most of the ruling party factions, gaining 377 votes to Fumio Kishida’s 89 votes and Shigeru Ishiba’s 68 votes. Neither of these two latter men did their future ambitions any good by staying in a race that was over before it officially started.

Suga has begun paying off those who played the decisive role in his victory: Both LDP Secretary-General Toshihiro Nikai and Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Taro Aso will be retaining their posts.

Some others, including Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi, are also tipped to stay put.

In the crucial post of chief cabinet secretary, which Suga is vacating after a historically long tenure, is Katsunobu Kato, currently health minister but also a long-time fixture among Abe and Suga aides.

There are plenty of reasons why Suga’s government will likely be considerably weaker than Abe’s, including the fact that he will have no automatic factional backing, was not born as part of the nation’s political aristocracy, and because he has an agenda of domestic bureaucratic reform that may soon win him many powerful enemies.

The last “outsider” to become leader of the nation as Liberal Democratic Party president was Junichiro Koizumi, but he nevertheless came from a political family and was protected by his exceptional charisma and ability to gain support from ordinary people.

Suga, by contrast, has shown no public charisma at all. If he possessed any such charm, it should have begun appearing during the past week as he campaigned for the top leadership post.

September 11, 2020

Suga Stumbles on Consumption Tax Policy

SNA (Tokyo) — Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga has made his first gaffe since openly emerging as Japan’s all-but-certain next prime minister.

Appearing with the two other ruling party candidates, Fumio Kishida and Shigeru Ishiba, on a Thursday evening television, Suga distinguished his position from the others by declaring that a consumption tax hike above the current rate of 10% would be necessary.

“Thinking ahead,” Suga explained, “we’ll have no choice but to raise the consumption tax, requesting the understanding of the people, after undertaking stringent administrative reforms.”

His comments quickly created alarm, especially in the context of the yet unresolved coronavirus pandemic and its associated economic recession. In fact, there have been many proposals mooted to reduce or even eliminate the consumption tax as a stimulus measure.

By this morning, Suga had become aware of his political misstep and offered a “clarification” which amounted to a retraction: “My comments about the sales tax were about the future. Prime Minister Abe has said an increase will not be needed for ten years, and I agree. Without ensuring economic vitality, restoring fiscal health will not happen.”

Of course, were Suga really thinking about the economy more than a decade in the future, presumably long after his own premiership has ended, then he might have well just said that no tax hike were necessary for the time being; he would have had no need to request “the understanding of the people” at this juncture.

However, the whole episode does give some insight into Suga’s economic thinking. While for political reasons he is portraying himself as the successor to Abenomics, his actual instincts seem to lay in precisely the opposite direction; his main concern being to reduce expenditures and slow down the expansion of the national debt.

September 9, 2020

Opposition Realignment Less Than Initially Advertised

SNA (Tokyo) — The realignment of opposition parties this month is on track to create a significantly more powerful leading force, which seems likely to retain the name Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, but in other respects it may turn out to be something less than initially advertised.

It now seems that no political party will be disappearing in anything more than a formal legal sense, and that Yuichiro Tamaki has been successful in gathering a sufficient number of lawmakers around him that his centrist project may continue to be viable and even retain its Democratic Party For the People name.

In other words, it now looks quite possible that both before and after the realignment there will a leading center-left party and a centrist party with the same names. The main difference will be that the supremacy of the center-left Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan in terms of the number of seats that it holds becomes unmistakeable.

In concrete terms, it now appears that the new Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan will initially hold 149 seats to the Democratic Party For the People’s 14 to 22 seats, the exact number depending on a group of eight lawmakers who are individually weighing out whether to become independents or to join Tamaki’s party.

Nevertheless, the new Democratic Party For the People will fall to fourth place among opposition parties behind the Japan Innovation Party (Osaka Ishin), which holds 26 Diet seats, and the Japan Communist Party, which holds 25 seats.

All other opposition parties will hold less than five seats.

September 7, 2020

Suga Aims to Proceed with Casino Legalization

SNA (Tokyo) — Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, the all-but-certain next prime minister of Japan, has indicated that he intends to move forward with one of the Abe government’s most controversial and unpopular initiatives–the legalization of casino gambling at up to three Integrated Resorts (IRs) around the nation.

“I think that IRs are indispensable for our tourism promotion efforts,” Suga told a program on Television Kanagawa on the evening of the 4th, “Although people tend to focus only on the casinos, the government intends to promote IRs as places with various facilities and hotels where families can come and stay during international conferences.”

While Suga has been well-known as a keen advocate of IR development, and has played a key role in overseeing the legislative and regulatory framework, his open public embrace of the initiative at this time can still be regarded as somewhat surprising.

As a politician soon to take over the reins of leadership and facing two national elections within the next two years (the House of Representatives general election by October 2021 and the House of Councillors election in July 2022), he might have been expected to soft pedal his support for a policy that the Japanese public has always opposed by large majorities.

This may be an early indication that the Suga government will behave in a quite similar fashion to the Abe government in the sense that it might be willing to embrace unpopular policies and then attempt to simply steamroller the opposition.

The current IR development timeline calls for interested local governments, together with their business consortium partners, to apply to the central government for one of the three available licenses between January and July of next year. However, due to various circumstances related to the Covid-19 pandemic and the casino bribery scandal, it is doubtful that this timeline will be maintained.

September 6, 2020

Shape of New Opposition Party Becomes Clearer

SNA (Tokyo) — The size, leadership, and policy orientation of the soon-to-be-established leading opposition party has become clearer in recent days.

According to surveys done by the Japanese media, a total of 149 lawmakers are planning to join the party, including 88 from the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, 40 from the Democratic Party For the People, and 21 independents.

Most significant in this respect is that 22 of the Democratic Party For the People’s 62 lawmakers are now expected to remain aloof from the new alliance. At least 10 lawmakers probably anticipated that they would join the new party, but backed away over the issue of nuclear power.

These 10 lawmakers derive their main backing from the Congress of Industrial Unions of Japan, a grouping which includes the firmly pro-nuclear Federation of Electric Power-Related Industry Workers’ Unions of Japan.

While it may be painful for the new party to see 10 of its potential lawmakers depart, it is almost certainly a benefit to the new party in terms of policy coherence.

This is an old battle between the majority of opposition lawmakers who have been decidedly anti-nuclear in their policy orientation since the March 2011 Fukushima Daiichi disaster, versus this group of pro-nuclear labor unions who are a minority, but absolutely unwilling to compromise on an issue that would lead to layoffs in the existing nuclear power industry.

It was this very issue more than any other that sank Renho in the October 2016-July 2017 period when she led the then-Democratic Party. She tried and failed to strengthen the party’s anti-nuclear policy, foundering on the fierce opposition of the pro-nuclear labor union lawmakers.

Strongly anti-nuclear policy was also one of the few identifiably progressive aspects of the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan since its birth in October 2017, made possible by the fact that these pro-nuclear labor union lawmakers had gathered within the centrist Democratic Party For the People and its immediate predecessors.

The recent decision of these two largest opposition parties to merge, however, reopened the question of nuclear power, until it became clear that the 10 pro-nuclear labor union lawmakers would refrain from joining the new merged party.

In other respects, the new merged party will almost certainly be led by Yukio Edano and have a leadership team that includes some of the prominent lawmakers such as Katsuya Okada who have remained as independents since the autumn of 2017.

Put another way, the new merged political party is likely to look a lot like the old Democratic Party of Japan, with the exception that some of the most conservative lawmakers and the pro-nuclear lawmakers will no longer be part of it. The new party can be expected to be centrist and cautious, with a few half-hearted progressive policies sprinkled in.

September 1, 2020

Suga Seals Victory with Hosoda Faction Endorsement

SNA (Tokyo) — Having gained the support of the massive Hosoda Faction, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga has effectively sealed his victory in the Liberal Democratic Party presidential elections, and is set to become the next prime minister of Japan on September 17.

Suga has accomplished this feat in advance of any public declaration that he is interested in the highest office. He relied, rather, on a handful of key power brokers such as LDP Secretary-General Toshihiro Nikai and Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Taro Aso to make the necessarily backroom arrangements.

Suga is expected to make a public declaration of his candidacy on September 3, already knowing he holds the votes to win.

It appears that Shigeru Ishiba is still planning to run, but his path to victory has already been foreclosed.

Nevertheless, about 145 ruling party lawmakers, or about one-third of the total, formally asked Nikai to allow rank-and-file party members to vote in the upcoming leadership election. This is a request that he is expected to reject as it would play to the benefit of Ishiba’s candidacy.

Other potential candidates such as Fumio Kishida, Toshimitsu Motegi, or Taro Kono have either indicated that they are not going to run, or should be thinking very carefully about withdrawing in the coming days.

It is possible that Suga’s premiership may suffer some taint from the lack of openness of the election process.

Soon, the mainstream media can be expected to produce glowing profiles of Suga, downplaying his key role in covering up the Shinzo Abe scandals and other unsavory matters of the past.

One focus of these profiles is likely to be the fact that Suga is the exact opposite of Abe in terms of his personal background, a self-made man from no political dynasty. He went from working in a cardboard factory in his youth to the head of the nation. This will invite comparisons to former Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka, another rare case of a commoner rising to the very top in Japan.

For breaking news, follow on Twitter @ShingetsuNews