Prime Minister Koizumi is taking a modest view of the significance of his efforts to privatize Japan Post:

Prime Minister Koizumi has christened his recent dissolution of the House of Representatives the “Japan Post-Galileo Dissolution,” borrowing the name of Galileo Galilei, the Italian physicist who advanced the idea that the Earth was not the center of the universe.

In response, Shizuka Kamei, a member of the group of Representatives who banded together to vote against the Japan Post privatization bill, shot back, “That guy? He’s the Ptolemaic!” What do Galileo scholars think about all of this?

“As a researcher, I wouldn’t trot out Galileo comparisons too lightly–that’s my unvarnished opinion,” said Professor Ichiro Tanaka, a science and technology historian at in the graduate department of natural science research at Kanazawa University and author of Galileo.

The Japanese words here, incidentally, are 地動説 (chidousetsu: “Earth” + “moves” + “argument” –> “heliocentric theory”) and 天動説 (tendousetu: “sky” + “moves” + “argument” –> “geocentric theory”).

So–is Koizumi about to be excommunicated? Whatever outcome you want from the election, you can, of course, find a poll that supports it. The Yomiuri has this summary of where things stand at this point, which should cheer supporters of the Koizumi cabinet:

“If the LDP continues to do well, we might well end up with fewer than 150 seats out of a total 480,” a senior DPJ member said.

“The LDP’s divisions over postal reform, led us to believe we were on the eve of grabbing power. But if we lose by a big margin this election, it’ll be us, not them, that will be split,” he admitted.

The DPJ’s fate, as in previous elections, is believed to lie with floating voters. Since the party has long depended on them, DPJ members know that such voters are fickle at best.

Koizumi and the LDP have insisted postal reform is the dominant campaign issue. “We’d like to get pensions back into the limelight. We’ll ask people, ‘Which is more important, postal services or pensions?’ and then win back their attention and support,” a senior DPJ member said.

A Yomiuri Shimbun poll Friday found the DPJ had an edge of nearly three percentage points over the LDP among floating voters.

Asked which party they would vote in the election, 11.5 percent of those with no party affiliation said they would vote for the DPJ while 9.2 percent said they would vote for the LDP.

In a Yomiuri survey conducted on Aug. 9, the DPJ was ahead of the LDP by 10.9 percent to 5.6 percent. But the most recent poll, released on Aug. 19, found the LDP ahead of DPJ, 12.5 percent to 11.2 percent.

Of course, there are still two weeks until the election, so there will be plenty more blustering and polling between now and then.

It’s interesting that that DPJ guy was talking about potential rifts in his own party. Just today there was this exchange:

LDP Secretary General Tsutomu Takebe said that, assuming the ruling coalition maintained its majority in the House of Representatives, “there will inevitably be a major shift in the political landscape, given that there are many in the DPJ who also support Japan Post privatization.” He indicated that his perception was that such developments could cause the DPJ to split. Responding, DPJ leader Katsuya Okada countered, “That’s an extremely rude thing to say. Impossible!”

The DPJ also pointed out, naturally, that the LDP also has members who didn’t go along party lines.

Much is being made of the fact that the LDP is focusing obsessively on Japan Post privatization, with the opposition parties figuring they can use it to their advantage and win voters over by shifting the discussion to other issues. Perhaps. Not all of Koizumi’s policies have been popular, and the communists and social democrats, for example, are trying to capitalize on the possibility that Article 9 of the constitution could be amended to allow for collective self-defense and on the increasing number of workers without positions as regular company employees.

The LDP has some potential tricks up its sleeve, though. It’s use of “assassin” candidates is described by the Mainichi here:

The LDP is reportedly planning to place its high profile candidates, referred to in Japanese as “shikaku,” or “assassins,” high on the party’s proportional representation list, basically ensuring them victory in the election.

But candidates standing for re-election to the Lower House, who are likely to face a tough battle in the election, are complaining that the preferential treatment of such candidates is unfair.

The LDP has pitted the high-profile candidates against rival candidates opposed to the postal privatization bills promoted by Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi.

The party’s proportional representation list will be released on Aug. 29. If the “assassins” are placed high on the list as expected, the party’s leadership is likely to come under fire from party members seeking re-election.

There have been plenty of complaints that the LDP’s funkier high-profile candidates are inexperienced politically; pushing them to the top of the proportional representation roster (the list of districts is here in Japanese, BTW) is seen as a kick in the teeth to party loyalists who supported Japan Post privatization but may not win seats in their individual districts. The proportional representation list is to be released tomorrow, so we’ll see what it looks like.

BTW, proportional representation, for those who find the Mainichi explanation confusing, involves setting aside 180 lower house seats and 98 upper house seats to be divided among 11 zones (large regions of Japan such as Hokkaido, Tohoku, and Tokyo) rather than little individual districts. Voters select a party to get the proportional representation seats for their zones; each party gets the same proportion of seats as it got votes. The idea is to keep parties that have significant support but didn’t win any seats with individual candidates from being shut out of the Diet entirely.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 28th, 2005 at 07:26 and is filed under elections, Japan Post, misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.