Prime Minister Abe Speaks

      Mr. Abe spoke on the main features of his policies in the both Houses of the Japanese Parliament (known as the Diet) on 12 February.  Here are some of these policies, together with my critical comments wherever relevant.

     At the very beginning, he said before going into the details that Japan will perform her responsibility in the international community in fighting terrorism.  He thus put Japan on the side of the willing, effectively though not formally.  He did not elaborate what was terrorism, whom he wanted to fight, and how it came into being in a large measure in the present world.  Terrorism is a word very vague and dangerous to use in the international context.  I have raised five questions on Abe's behaviour, including his language, in connection with the Japanese hostages who were murdered by the ISIL.

     Then, Abe made it clear that he wants to see the TPP negotiations to come to an early conclusion, to lower the corporation tax by 2.5 %, to reopen the nuclear plants which are considered safe, to let the company profit to be related to the rise in wages, and to raise the consumption tax from the present 8 % to ten from April 2017.

     It is clear from them that he is firmly standing on the trickling-down theory which is now labelled out of date, even by the OECD, the alliance of the rich countries, in its recent report. The lower corporation tax and the successive hike in the consumption tax, heavier on the poor people, will assure the income tax in general to be on the high level.  The average monthly wage has come down from its highest in 1997 by as much as \ 55, 000 by now, showing the bankruptcy of the trickling-down theory.  On the reopening of the nuclear plants, Abe is apparently taking the side of the nuclear business industry, as the Fukushima plant is still not able to deal with its contaminated water.

     On the diplomacy and security, Abe sticks to the Japan-US alliance, and says that he will go ahead with the construction of the new US air base at Henoko, Okinawa, in spite of the overwhelming opposition of the residents of Okinawa Prefecture, as represented in several elections toward the end of 2014.

     In the last minute or two of his speech Abe referred to the issue of the Constitutional amendment, without getting into any details.  It did not look nice.  Worse still, he did not say a word on the talk he is supposed to give around 15 August this year in commemoration of the 70 years of the end of the War.                

Delhi Assembly Elections

     Elections to the Delhi Legislative Assembly were held on 7 February, and the result came to be known on 10.  It was a huge surprise.  The Aam Admi Party(AAP) got 67 out of seventy, while the BJP, in spite of its control on the national government with the charismatic Prime Minister, Mr. Narendra Modi, got only three.  The Congress got none, yes, none at all.  Is such a result going to be an exception in the Indian politics, or does it show the shape of things to come?  I do not think anybody will dare to answer right now.

     The Congress obtained only 9 % of the votes polled.  This shows that there is tremendous disappointment among the people with the Congress, or rather with the dynasty that rules it. Rajdeep Sardesai's book, 2014, makes it clear how the mother and the son failed to present any constructive initiative before the electorate at the Lok Sabha elections in May 2014. It will be beyond comprehension if they both do not retire now from the Presidentship and the Vice-Presentship of the Party.  The Party itself had better, at least for the time being, dissolve itself into something of Mahatma Gandhi's Lok Sevak Sangh, of which we have again been reminded just a couple of weeks ago, on 30 January.

     In terms of the votes, the BJP, with its 32 %, has not done so badly.  In the Lok Sabha it polled 31 %,  and got the landslide victory.  Still their defeat is a surprise when the party has got all the seven Parliamentary seats from Delhi.  The only possible explanation is that their policies have not been sufficiently pro-poor.  Also, against the AAP, who represents the anti-corruption mood in the country, the BJP has not been seen as an anti-corruption party.

     Now the AAP, which has got an scary 54 %.  I have seen Mr. Kejriwal on the TV who was by the side of the fasting Anna Hazare in Delhi in August 2011.  Is he able to retain the control on the government this time and go ahead with the anti-corruption programme?  Is he able to build his party in other States also to be the viable force to oppose the BJP with a more pro-poor policy, and to take the place of the Congress?  Everything is uncertain.  But the Indian politics has become suddenly very volatile.  

Japanese Hostages

     Two Japanese have been taken hostages by the IS.  One of them is believed to have been already killed.  The second one has said in his broadcast late last night, Japan time, that he has been given twenty-four hours to live unless a woman terrorist captive by the Jordanian Government is released.

     Here I would like to write several questions concerning Japanese PM Abe's recent Middle East tour which immediately preceded this crisis during which the IS made the first announcement that they would murder the hostages.

    Abe and his entourage left Japan on 16 January.  Their first visit was to Egypt, where Abe gave a speech outlining his Middle East policy on 17.  My first question is why he said that he would give $ 200 million as humanitarian grant-in-aid specifically to those Arab countries fighting the IS.  Abe must have been known about the two hostages in their hands.  Did at least this part of his speech not amount to provocation to the IS?

     After the  speech he conferred with the Egyptian President, the former Army Chief of Staff, who and whose Government are strongly hostile to the Muslim Brotherhood, and said that democratic transition of power was in progress in Egypt.  This was clearly another provocation.

     Then he visited Jordan on 17 and 18, meeting the King on both days, and proceeded to Israel. He conferred with the Israeli Prime Minister on two days, 18 and 19, reportedly on how to cope with the Islamists.  He, incidentally, also met the hawkish US Republican Senator McCain.  My third question is if he did not notice how dangerous it could be for the lives of the hostages to show publicly such intimate relations with the Israeli Government.

     On 20, the next day, while Abe was still in Jerusalem, the first announcement by the IS was broadcast.  Abe denounced it in a press conference in Jerusalem.  He then visited the Palestinian President in the West Bank on the same day, returned to Jerusalem, and came home on 21. Before coming home, however, he put the Vice Foreign Minister, who was in the entourage, in charge of the on-the-spot operation to be based at the Japanese Embassy in Jordan.  Jordan is among the US-led coalition of the willing against the IS.  Is the location appropriate?

     My fifth and final question is, why even now does Abe not try to keep distance from the US? The IS is, after all, a part of the legacy of the Iraq invasion of 2003.  Japan supported that invasion, and even sent a token military contingent.  For this reason alone, it is high time Japan might come away from the US intentions.  At the moment she is moving in the opposite direction. When the murder of the first hostage had been broadcast on 24, Abe phoned up Obama who was in India the next day.  This is hardly the way Japan can make contribution to a peaceful solution of the many-faceted Middle Eastern crisis.              

       

Terror in Paris

     The great terror struck into the mind of the people of Paris and elsewhere, which started with an armed attack on a weekly newspaper on Wednesday, 7 January 2015, has not come to an end.  I would like to join all the others who are mourning the death of the victims.  I would also like to express my solidarity with those who are making a determined condemnation of the violence.

     I would like to make it clear, however, that I am not able to bring myself to support the view that the way the weekly newspaper was publishing under the name of satire should be defended in the name of the freedom of expression.  The freedom of expression should be certainly defended.  As a matter of fact it has been fought for and won by the efforts of the numerous people.  But is it worth the name, the glorious name, of that freedom to publish whatever one wishes to, even if it offends many innocent people?  And knowingly?

     And it is no ordinary minority of people.  There are said to be five to six million Muslims in France alone.  Some of them must be devout followers of the faith, many others must be secular.  However that may be, is France, meaning the ordinary French people, going to live with them in the many years to come or not?  If yes, is it not necessary for the French to come to terms with them by adjusting some of the traditional ideas they have been entertaining?  Even if they do so, it would not amount to the repression of the freedom of expression, which is part of the universal values of the mankind.  But perhaps they would have to modify their interpretation of it if necessary.  What is currently going on is a case in point.

     Many French would ask, why there are so many Muslims they have to cope with in their own country?  But it is the end-result of their own colonial history in the past, and they are reaping what they have sown for a long time.  They would have to take into consideration that many of those immigrants are in a disadvantageous condition.  Moreover, they are facing the rapid rise in recent years of the extreme Right in French politics who should not be there in a country of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.

     There is one more thing I would like to say here.  It is the relationship among the ordinary French, the immigrant Muslims, and the Jewish in France.  The terrorists have also attacked a Jewish supermarket.  Needless to say this was an unprovoked action, and it is likely to enhance hostility among the Jewish toward the Muslims.  It will also damage the position of the Palestinians.  What I would add here is that the Muslim immigrants are also facing the strong pro-Jewish and anti-Muslim prejudice in the Jewish-Muslim spectrum.  Take, for example, what the French Prime Minister said on the street this time.  He said, 'We are all French Jews'.  Beautiful words if seen as the expression of solidarity with the victims.  But why not some words of solidarity with the ordinary, innocent Muslims at the same time, who must be deeply hurt by the terror and are badly in need of those words?                 

Year-end Lower House Elections in Japan, 2014

     A Happy New Year to you all.  Let us hope, and we are entitled to hope, that the world will be more peaceful, with less socio-economic inequality, at the end of the year.

     Japan's Prime Minister Abe dissolved the Lower House of the Parliament much ahead of the end of its term, and the elections were held on 14 December.  We will take up three prominent features out of the results.  But why did he decide to go to the electorate to begin with?

     In short, in this writer's view, he lost confidence in his ability to manage economy.  It had been taken for granted that the economic performance would prove to be poor in the April-June quarter because of the hike in the consumption tax from 5 to 8 % on 1 April.  But contrary to the forecast, the downward trend continued in the July-September quarter, inviting sharper criticism of the "Abenomics".  The share prices continued to go up, but that was the only positive-if we may say so-upward trend in the economy, and its benefit was apparently limited to a very small stratum which includes lots of foreign buyers.  Almost every opinion poll would indicate that the great majority felt that the benefit of Abe's policies had not reached them.  He had been compelled to postpone the next stage of the hike to 10 % scheduled for 1 October 2015.

     The first prominent feature of the election results was that, in spite of all the above, Abe's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), together with its coalition partner, Komei Party, got a little more than two-thirds majority of the 475 seats in the House.  The voting rate was the lowest ever, 53 %.   A poll conducted soon afterwards says that only 11 % replied that it was because Abe's policies were highly valued by the electorate, but an astounding 72 % was of the view that it was because the opposition parties could not present viable counter measures.  The disaffection with the Abenomics was more clearly shown in the near wiping out of some of the opposition parties positioned more to the right of the LDP.  The foreign media called it the winning by default, and they were right.

     Another aspect of this was that, while the LDP got 75 % of the seats in the single-member constituencies, accounting for the majority of the seats, with only 48 % of the votes, they could get only 33 % of the party-wise proportional representation.

     The second feature was that the Communist Party of Japan nearly doubled their votes in the proportional representation to 11 %, and thereby increased its seats dramatically from the mere 8 to 21.  

     The third was the fact that in Okinawa Prefecture, where the main issue was whether to construct a new air base for the US forces stationed in Japan by the US-Japan Security Treaty, the candidates of the opposition alliance defeated the LDP candidates in all the four single-member constituencies.   This was also an epoch-making event, which took place on the heels of the anti-Abe, anti-LDP victory of the opposition alliance in the elections both for the Governor of Okinawa and the Mayor of Naha, its major administrative city, on 16 November, just four weeks previously.

     How will the Japanese politics move on from these points this year 2015?  Has the pattern in Okinawa shown the shape of things to come?  And will Abe and his LDP try to go ahead with their two-thirds majority in the Lower House in the direction of the Constitutional Amendment?