Japanese politics

Self-immolation thwarted

A lone crusader takes on the big guns of Japan's ruling party—and survives for the time being

Ozawa: a rare hint of vulnerability

AS ONE of 15 deputy secretaries-general in the ruling Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), Yukio Ubukata may often have found it hard to make his voice heard. Not in the past week. With his disarmingly unaffected manner, the veteran member of parliament has hit the airwaves denouncing what he calls a dangerous concentration of power and money in the hands of his boss, Ichiro Ozawa.

He knew it was a strategy with a high risk of self-immolation. Mr Ozawa is the DPJ’s secretary-general. As the architect of its landslide election victory last August, he is widely regarded as the most powerful politician in Japan. Even Yukio Hatoyama, the prime minister, yields before him.

What’s more, Mr Ubukata complains, Mr Ozawa controls all the DPJ’s funds and allocates them to his most loyal supporters. He selects which candidates the party will endorse to run for it during elections. Such influence makes it very hard for fellow party members to lend public support to any revolt against him. “Ozawa-san’s way of handling politics is to give money only to people who share his opinion. That is what is distorting democracy within the party. Because of that, no one can stand up to him. That is the source of his power,” Mr Ubukata says.

Such incendiary claims could easily be dismissed as the rants of a man with a grudge. But compellingly, Mr Ubukata has continued to voice them even after Mr Ozawa and Mr Hatoyama personally intervened on March 23rd to stop the party sacking him for his insubordination.

By his account, his brief meeting with Mr Ozawa to secure his future verged on the surreal. After they had both agreed that he should stay on in his post, Mr Ubukata tried to air his grievances to his boss, notably his concerns about the increasingly authoritarian nature of his leadership. But, he says, Mr Ozawa left the room abruptly, saying he had no time to discuss such matters.

For policy wonks, the rift has a philosophical aspect, in a country that has only just emerged from half a century of monolithic one-party rule. Since he first joined the opposition in 1993, Mr Ozawa has argued for a reformed parliamentary system in Japan, modelled on Britain’s House of Commons. He believes the government and ruling party should work together under a strong prime minister, with backbenchers kept in line by a party whip. This, he believes, would end the murky consensus politics that has made decision-making in Japan so hard.

But Mr Ubukata believes such a system is a waste of the many backbenchers among the DPJ’s 423 elected politicians. He wants them drafted in to help make policy in Japan, rather than sitting idly on the sidelines. This is what he believes the DPJ stood for when it promised to overhaul a corrupt, decades-old system in which policy was decided by bureaucrats and rubber-stamped by elected officials. In addition, he wants the party to craft its own policy proposals, rather than waiting for orders from above.

He admits to being disappointed that his one-man crusade did not set off a broader revolt. The “seven magistrates” in the cabinet who are opposed to Mr Ozawa by and large kept their heads down—perhaps betting that Mr Ozawa and Mr Hatoyama will be ousted anyway this summer if the upper-house results are bad.

That is not good enough for Mr Ubukata, who believes Mr Ozawa, embroiled in campaign-finance scandals since last year, should resign well before the upper-house elections, to give the DPJ time to rebuild its credibility. He may get his way. The rare hint of vulnerability shown by Mr Ozawa in keeping Mr Ubukata on may be a sign that the end is nearly upon him.