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Japan's bureaucracy strikes back

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In Brief

Japan’s Public Prosecutors Office (PPO), especially the Special Investigation Department (SID) of the Tokyo District PPO, takes pride in its vigorous pursuit of politicians taking bribes, especially from construction firms. In the past, its gaze has fallen almost exclusively on Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) politicians, whom it has pursued without fear or favour. In the last year or so, it has switched its gaze, and begun going after the two most prominent Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) politicians, Secretary-General Ozawa and Prime Minister Hatoyama, and their political secretaries, with an alacrity that has given rise to some speculation that its actions might have been politically motivated.

Providing evidence to support such allegations is almost as difficult as finding concrete evidence that Ozawa, Hatoyama and their faithful servants have committed offences under Japanese law.

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Moreover, any alleged political motivations may be far more complex than first thought.

As someone with first-hand knowledge of dealing with the SID of the Tokyo District PPO, a former official in the Foreign Ministry, Satō Masaru, understands what Ishikawa Tomohiro, Ozawa’s former secretary, is going through. Satō has published an article in this month’s issue of Chūō Kōron, in which he explains that for the public prosecutors, Ishikawa is simply a stepping stone to get to Ozawa himself.

Satō feels that he was used in the same way by the PPO in 2002, when he was placed in the position of a ‘stair’ (kaidan) to ensnare former LDP Lower House Diet member Suzuki Muneo. A former Suzuki protégé in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA), Satō is no friend of Suzuki these days. In his memoirs (Kokka no Wana: Gaimushō no Rasupuchin to Yobarete [A Trap Laid by the Nation: The So-Called Rasputin of the Foreign Ministry], Shinchōsha, 2005), he describes him as the ‘Rasputin of the Foreign Ministry’. Satō revisits this description in his Chūō Kōron article and continues to claim that he was the victim of a politically motivated investigation. In 2009, Satō unsuccessfully appealed his conviction for misusing government funds and interfering in the bidding for an aid project for Russia under Suzuki’s influence.

Ironically, Ozawa has been taking phone calls from Suzuki during his current ordeal. Now the New Party DAICHI representative for the regional bloc of Hokkaido in the Lower House and a newfound ally of the DPJ, Suzuki was ‘twice…voted the most corrupt politician in all Japan’.

Unlike Ozawa, who has successfully escaped the public prosecutor’s net, Suzuki was indicted and convicted on political corruption charges. After being charged, he was forced to spend 437 days in detention for fear that he might tamper with the evidence against him. His legal battles are by no means over. Sentenced to a two-year term for taking bribes in 2004 and currently out on ¥50 million bail, he is appealing his conviction in the Supreme Court. If he loses, he faces jail and a five-year ban on standing in his former constituency under the Political Funds Control Law. One of Suzuki’s most famous sayings was ‘it is not guiding benefits to the regions (pork barrelling), it is ‘fair distribution’!’ (chihō e no reiki yûdō de wa nai, ‘kōsei haibun’ de aru!).

Suzuki was also known as ‘the behind-the-scenes foreign minister’ (see Itō Hirotoshi in Gendai, October 2002, p. 82) who engaged in a mud-slinging feud with the Foreign Minister in the first Koizumi administration, Tanaka Makiko, over who was actually in charge of the ministry. Among Suzuki’s many sub rosa activities in MOFA, he exercised particular influence over its overseas aid projects. In his book, Satō said: ‘If Makiko is a poisonous snake, Muneo is a scorpion’. For most Foreign Ministry officials, it was a case of ‘a plague on both your houses’.

However, in what must strike dread into the hearts of MOFA officials, Suzuki has now landed the job of chairman of the Lower House Foreign Affairs committee. This may have been a deliberate move on Ozawa’s part to bring MOFA to heel by letting Suzuki loose again in the conduct of the nation’s foreign affairs. Suzuki has been in charge of the latest round of grillings of former MOFA officials, including Togo Kazuhiko, former Director-General of the Treaties Bureau, over the likely shredding of top secret documents relating to the secret US-Japan agreement allowing US warships to carry nuclear weapons into Japan.

But there’s a far bigger issue at stake. The ‘Ozawa versus prosecutors’ skirmish is a serious preliminary round in the much bigger fight between politicians and bureaucrats over who rules Japan. Its implications could be far-reaching, extending even to who has primary carriage for constitutional interpretation and for the management of the US-Japan alliance.

According to Satō, the public prosecutors think that bureaucrats should control the country and are diametrically opposed to Ozawa, who thinks that politicians should rule. The prosecutors want to build a ‘clean society’ and dislike the concentration of power in Ozawa’s hands. They were hoping for two breakthroughs in this battle of bureaucrats versus politicians: one was Hatoyama’s ‘donations from dead persons’ problem and the other was the affair involving Ozawa. The prosecutors targeted Hatoyama first but he proved too difficult a nut to crack, so they changed their target to Ozawa, watching Ishikawa closely to find out if something would come up on which they could arrest him.

Satō argues that the public prosecutors regard present trends under the DPJ as a usurpation of state power by incompetent politicians. He lists various attacks on the bureaucracy by the DPJ, which have rankled with government officials: abolishing the administrative vice-ministers’ meetings prior to cabinet; the threat to abolish the post of administrative vice-minister as head of each ministry, depriving bureaucrats of their ‘control tower’; and the public ridicule to which ministry officials were subjected during the budget screening conducted by the Government Revitalisation Unit.

Most significantly for the conduct of Japanese foreign and security policy are the DPJ’s Diet reforms, which would ban the Director-General of the Cabinet Legislation Bureau and the Director-General of the International Legal Affairs Bureau (formerly Treaties Bureau) in the Foreign Ministry from answering questions in the Diet. This is a far more significant development than appears at first glance. The Director-General of the Cabinet Legislation Bureau, not the Supreme Court, has traditionally had the final say in interpreting the constitution and the Director-General of the Treaties Bureau, with responsibility for interpreting the US-Japan Security Treaty, has had a primary role in managing the US-Japan alliance. As Satō points out, the upshot of the Diet reforms is that politicians themselves will be able to re-interpret the constitution with respect to issues such as collective defence and collective security, and the major role of maintaining the US-Japan Security Treaty will be transferred from MOFA to politicians in the Diet.

The public prosecutors see Ozawa’s hand directly in these particular developments. He has a negative history with the Cabinet Legislation Bureau going back to 1990-1991 when the Director-General of the bureau effectively blocked any Japanese military contribution to the Gulf War. This stymied Ozawa’s hopes for the Japanese military to participate in collective security operations in the Gulf under UN auspices. Ozawa is now seeking his revenge against the bureaucrats, but it will be a race to see who gets their retaliation in first.

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