Phoenix-like Ozawa set to re-ignite
Japan By Kosuke Takahashi
TOKYO - No Japanese politician has
suffered such tumultuous torment as Ichiro Ozawa
in recent years. By snatching victory from the
jaws of defeat, the former Democratic Party of
Japan (DPJ) chief is about to rise, phoenix-like,
to power again in Tokyo. Ozawa, 69, a
long-time heavyweight in Japanese politics, was
found not guilty of breaking political funding
laws in a ruling handed down by the Tokyo District
Court on Thursday.
Under investigation, he
was forced to resign as party leader in May 2009 -
just ahead of a major power shift in Japan's de
facto one-party dominance of government in the
post-war era. Without investigators' probes,
Japan's kingpin Ozawa would have been the
nation's prime minister
two-and-a-half years ago.
His win in a
court of law secures a comeback that has
far-reaching implications on both domestic and
international fronts. With Ozawa and his cohorts -
who constitute the largest faction in the ruling
DPJ - strongly opposing a consumption tax hike
proposal, Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda is
expected to lose his centripetal force of
political power. Ozawa, viewed as pro-China, is
also expected to rock the dynamics of
Japan-US-China relations.
"This absolutory
sentence will cause fatal damage on the already
suffering Noda administration," Minoru Morita, a
noted political analyst in Tokyo, told Asia Times
Online on Thursday. "A consumption tax hike
becomes impossible now."
Noda has
repeatedly said he vows to realize the tax hike at
the expense of his political life. He even
expressed his intention to double the consumption
tax to 10% by the mid-2010s at the Group of 20
summit meeting in Cannes, France, last November,
virtually making the tax hike an international
pledge.
Advancing toward a tax hike with
the economy still fragile in the aftermath of last
year's earthquake and tsunami is bad timing on the
part of Noda. According to a poll conducted
between April 20 and April 22 by the Nikkei
Shimbun and TV Tokyo, 29% of respondents approved
of his cabinet, while 62% disapproved, the worst
showing since he took office in September 2011.
"The majority of lawmakers in both the DPJ
and the opposition Liberal Democratic Party [LDP]
are against a tax hike," Morita said. "With Ozawa
restarting to move ahead actively from now on,
campaigns against a consumption tax hike will get
momentum."
In an online broadcast last
week, Ozawa signaled that he planned to run in the
party's next presidential election in September,
meaning if he wins he is the next prime minister.
Illegal searches In January 2011, Ozawa
was indicted by a citizen judicial panel for
alleged involvement in falsifying political
funding reports on 400 million yen (about US$5
million), in violation of the Political Funds
Control Law.
Although the trial had
focused on whether Ozawa's aides falsified records
and whether he was notified and had approved of
the falsification, the Tokyo District Court on
February 17, 2012, rejected adopting as evidence
most of the depositions taken by the investigative
team from the Tokyo District Public Prosecutors
Office from one of the former aides. The court
found the depositions were not credible since
Tokyo prosecutors used illegal tactics to obtain
them.
Why did prosecutors press ahead
against Ozawa even by means of unlawful tactics?
Political observers such as Morita view that since
Ozawa has advocated shifting decision-making
responsibility from bureaucrats to politicians, he
provoked a major backlash in the nation's
ponderous bureaucracy.
Powerful
politicians such as Ozawa, who boldly aims to
tackle national problems through strong-arm
tactics and risk-taking to confront and rein in
the bloated bureaucracy, could be a major threat
for Japan's mainstream conservative political
elites, ruled by officialdom in Tokyo. Many view
this led to the arrest of his aides over political
donations by public prosecutors and their
accusations against him. "This problem happened
just ahead of the 2009 general election, which was
about to bring about a change of government,"
Ozawa said in an interview with a Japanese weekly
magazine in January. "Although there was no
conclusive evidence, prosecutors conducted a
criminal investigation into the head of the
largest opposition party, which might cause regime
change soon. Something like this ought not to be
allowed in a democratic society."
Japanese
weekly magazines have criticized the Japanese mass
media, most notably the conservative Yomiuri
Shimbun, as repeatedly portraying Ozawa as the
villain by running damaging stories about him
based on a constant leak from prosecutors.
"The Japanese mass media won't become
unrepentant this time as well," Morita said. "You
know what they are?"
As for domestic
problems, Ozawa has also criticized the Noda
cabinet's move to push the reactivation of two
reactors at Kansai Electric Power Co's Oi nuclear
plant in Fukui prefecture.
International implications In the
past, Ozawa has irritated the US by saying the US
Navy's 7th Fleet, based in Yokosuka, Kanagawa
prefecture, would be enough to secure the US
military presence in the Asia-Pacific region from
a strategic viewpoint - suggesting that he
supported the withdrawal of all other US forces
from Japan. In addition, Ozawa has been critical
of Noda on Japan's participation in the
Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations.
"Although this is also applied to the
issue of moving Marine Corps Air Station Futenma
in Okinawa, Japan cannot equally talk to the US
without showing what kind of the role Japan will
play clearly. The problems lie in Japan's
negotiating capabilities and the system," Ozawa
said in an interview with the Asahi Shimbun in
February.
Ozawa's comeback to the center
of the Japanese politics may ease the nation's
tensions with China. In December 2009, Ozawa, then
secretary general of the DPJ, accompanied more
than 600 people, including 143 DPJ lawmakers from
the upper and lower houses of the Diet
(parliament), to Beijing. The visit was conducted
as part of regular exchanges between the DPJ and
the Chinese Communist Party, whose general
secretary is Chinese President Hu Jintao.
Ozawa is widely viewed as pro-China. His
background and roots go back to a group founded by
late prime minister Kakuei Tanaka, which signed a
Japan-China joint communique that helped normalize
diplomatic relations with China in 1972.
But Morita disagreed with this view. "He
is different from Tanaka, so he is not pro-China
by his nature."
Kosuke Takahashi
is a Tokyo-based Japanese journalist. Besides Asia
Times Online, he also writes for IHS Jane's
Defence Weekly as Tokyo correspondent. His twitter
is @TakahashiKosuke
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