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Op-Ed
Editorial: The Case for Ozawa
Saturday, August 28, 2010
Tough Ozawa
Although Japan possesses media organizations generally considered to be both liberal as well as conservative, the sad truth is that all of these major news organizations tend to speak with a single voice on a variety of important public issues.
This is not because only one view is defensible, but rather because these media organizations share the same interests, and utilize the same sources of information.
One of our advantages at PanOrient News is that we are truly independent, and so we are able to present alternative views that the other Japanese media organizations don't dare to express.
Maybe that's why they want to shut us out.
At any rate, here we would like to express a non-mainstream view on the expected candidacy of Ichiro Ozawa for DPJ president, and thus prime minister of Japan.
As we do so, we are not formally "endorsing" Ozawa's election. In fact, there are also many things about incumbent Prime Minister Naoto Kan that we like, especially in comparison to most LDP prime ministers of the past few decades. We recognize distinct advantages and disadvantages to both of Mr. Ozawa and Mr. Kan.
But what we would like to do here is to sketch out the positive qualities of Mr. Ozawa at a time when most media and most commentators are expressing unrelenting hostility toward the man. Our hope is that, by the end of this article, you may see Ozawa in a new light.
To review, the conventional narrative is this: Mr. Ozawa is a political dinosaur whose shady financial practices and backroom-dealing is reflective of a bygone era of money politics. (Indeed, some people are going so far as to imply that he wants to become prime minister so as to escape prosecution.) Having never before held the office of prime minister and now in the twilight of his career, his oversized ego now demands that he hold the top office, no matter what the consequences for his party and his nation.
The notion that Mr. Ozawa is, in some part, a creature of Japan's old political system is not something that can be denied. Whatever his precise motives are, they certainly reach back for decades and are shaped by the environment in which he grew to political maturity.
It seems likely to us, however, that Ozawa's many years of experience in Japanese politics should not be seen only in their negative aspect, but also in terms of the fact that there may be no other active Japanese politician who possesses his deep understanding of both the strengths and weaknesses of the Japanese system.
As for the "ego trip" issue, we would point out that Mr. Ozawa keeps his own counsel with famous strictness, and so nobody really knows what his motives consist of. Those who impart to him motives of jealousy or avarice or whatever, are not doing so based upon any particular evidence; rather, they are simply reading into his silence whatever base motives they choose to attribute to him.
At the risk of making the same mistake in the opposite way, let us presume for a moment that Ozawa is not the jealous, corrupt old man that is so often portrayed, but rather a farsighted statesman who cares deeply about the future of his nation.
As we do so, note that the scenario we are sketching out is at least equally plausible to the conventional narrative in terms of its fitting the known facts...
In this scenario, Ozawa is the true reformer. He grew up in the old system and came to hate it. He decided to try to destroy that old system to allow a more modernized and forward-looking nation to emerge from the wreckage of the old.
His initial attempts in the 1990s foundered on his fatal miscalculation that the old Socialist Party would never join hands with their traditional enemies, the LDP.
After many years in the political wilderness, he eventually came to lead the main opposition DPJ in 2006. He whipped that organization into shape and led it to crushing victories in the 2007 and 2009 elections.
However, the old political-bureaucratic system well understands that Ozawa is their deadly enemy and so uses almost any means - fair or foul - to protect itself against him.
While it remains unclear how much (or how little) merit there may be in the corruption allegations against Mr. Ozawa, this scenario suggests that the prosecutors targeted him largely in order to prevent him from gaining the office of prime minister that he was clearly heading toward in early 2009.
Reluctantly, Ozawa stepped aside in favor of his lieutenant, Yukio Hatoyama, in May 2009. This allowed the DPJ to score its landslide victory in August, but it also put an extremely weak and vacillating man in the top office. No need to say how that ended.
And why is Ozawa running now? According to this scenario, it is not because of vanity or jealousy, but because he wants to finish the job that he started long ago and believes that Naoto Kan is simply too weak and too confused to handle the challenge.
Indeed, who in the Japanese political world today has ever shown the grit and toughness of Ichiro Ozawa? Are the others not, for the most part, a bunch of willows who blow this way and that way with every political wind?
Mr. Ozawa, on the other hand, has stood his ground and been hated for it. Even now, the political right carries posters calling Ozawa a national traitor and representing him as a political demon.
Why? Because he supports a more friendly and intimate Japan-China relationship; and because he wants to give permanent foreign residents of Japan, including ethnic Koreans who have lived here all their lives, the right to participate in local elections.
Clearly, Mr. Ozawa must be deranged!
The US-Japan alliance circles are afraid of Ozawa as well because they understand that he is just about the only Japanese politician strong enough to say "no" and make it stick.
Ozawa would almost certainly abandon the Henoko airbase plan and tell the US Marines to get lost. He would probably invite the SDP back into the government to underline his resolve in this respect.
Although Ozawa is fundamentally a conservative and a nationalist, he shares many goals in common with the Japanese left and would help them realize a number of their political aspirations. It is not by chance that most DPJ liberals are firmly in the Ozawa camp.
In the end, the point of this exercise has been to provoke consumers of the mainstream news not to get too lazy-minded and simply absorb the prejudices of the major media without due reflection.
Is Ozawa hated because he's corrupt? Or is he hated because he's a genuine threat to the cozy norms of a corrupt Japanese system?
PanOrient News
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