The really intriguing questions in relation to this latest scandal have always been: what favours? And, what were the mechanisms involved? The last is the hardest to answer. The only information that appears to be publicly available is that i) Okubo acted as a key link person pre-arranging successful bids for contracts amongst donating companies (i.e. bid-rigging); and ii) Ozawa was paid not to act against particular company’s bids (as revealed in yesterday’s posting). There is no reason to suspect that the company executives who spilled these beans were lying. They make sense of the whole mess and the kind of influence that Ozawa might exert. True, they assume that Ozawa still exercises this influence over the allocation of contracts in Iwate/Akita – either through the central government ministries and/or through local governments. But neither is hard to believe given his long career inside and outside the LDP, the fact that he learned his money-gathering skills from Tanaka and Kanemaru, and the fact that he remains a hugely influential member of the Japanese Diet with connections and historical ties that stretch all the way down from the national government to the prefectural and municipal levels and to construction companies of all shapes and sizes involved in the Tohoku PWs industry. There is probably (to use Pol.Sc. jargon) a lot of ‘path-dependency’ in the behaviours of all involved.

How could Ozawa use his influence to obstruct construction company bids? He would have to have control over the careers of the bureaucrats who made the final decisions.
The only time Ozawa might have had such an influence would have been during the days of the LDP-New Komeito-Liberal Party coalition government.

With the transmission mechanism is missing, I would take the claims of executives culled from Shukan Gendai cum granum salis.

Furthermore, why pay to play in Iwate? As an opposition stronghold, one could scarcely imagine an LDP-dominated government wishing to shower Iwate’s citizens with public works contracts. The LDP is lumbering but it is not blockheaded.

My photocopied version of Nester’s article had ‘TWQ’ written on the top of it. I assumed this meant ‘The Washington Quarterly’. Thank you for the correction. To be honest, I thought it was rather detailed and in-depth for ‘The Washington Quarterly’ which prefers more general think-pieces.

In response to Michael Vaughan’s comment:

I would just say that Japanese voters have already had to forget a lot of money politics-related scandal when it comes to Ozawa. He has projected an image of being a reformer rather than ‘Mr Clean’. He was truly a scion of the Tanaka-Kanemaru generation of LDP politicians, and we all know how corruption scandals brought down both of these men. Ozawa’s reputation as a reformer goes back a long way: e.g. his proposal for Japan to switch from ‘passive’ to ‘active pacifism’ was first made in 1992 when he was head of the LDP’s Special Commission Concerning the Role of Japan in Global Society Until the last few days at least, these reforms did not include any proposals for revamping the Political Funds Control Law and thus tightening the major regulations concerning political funding (to the best of my knowledge).

I think you mean The Third World Quarterly.