Japan Post privatization was approved by the House of Councillors today:

The Japan Post privatization bills were approved and enacted by a majority, mostly from the ruling coalition, in a session of the upper house on 14 October. The final vote was 134 in favor, 100 opposed. On 1 October 2007, the Japan Post Public Corporation will be privatized and spun off into four companies: one for postal service, one for postal savings, one for postal insurance, and one for window services.

The US and Japan are still in negotiations over the Futenma USMC base in Okinawa and (of course) the ban on beef imports. Thomas Schieffer, Howard Baker’s colorless successor as US ambassador to Japan, appears to be trying to apply pressure:

Japan has proposed holding a “two plus two” top level security meeting on Oct. 29 over the issue and expects the two countries to compile an interim report on the realignment of U.S. forces in Japan before U.S. President George W. Bush’s expected visit in November.

Schieffer said the Futenma issue should be resolved before discussing these matters, while stressing that they should be left to the two countries’ negotiators.

“I think the purpose of the interim agreement is to announce something that is substantive,” he said. “We wouldn’t want to have a meeting just for a meeting’s sake.”

He called ongoing bilateral talks on the U.S. military’s realignment plans strategic negotiations.

“What we have been continuing to try to stress throughout the negotiations…are strategic elements in the alliance,” Schieffer said. “What we also want to do is look at what those forces would be and what they will need to be capable of doing in the future in order to be effective.”

Schieffer also expressed strong dissatisfaction with Japan’s ban on U.S. beef imports due to concerns over mad cow disease.

“I’m afraid it has done real damage to the American-Japanese relationship, because it has reminded people of some of the trade frictions that existed between our two countries in the 1980s,” he said. “I hope that the issue resolves as soon as possible, because if this continues to go on, I think that the United States Congress is going to impose sanctions on Japan.”

“I hope that the matter will be largely resolved, if not completely [by the time of Bush’s visit],” he said.

Well, the beef import ban is excessive given what scientists know about BSE; I’m not sure that comparisons with Japan’s outright protectionist trade barriers of two decades ago really work. In any case, the Japanese government appears to be relenting on the issue of where to move Futenma’s helicopter operations, which to judge from reports will make restructuring easier for the armed forces.

No surprise here, but the Japan Post privatization bill package has passed the House of Representatives:

On Tuesday morning, the Lower House special committee on postal privatization held deliberations on the bills presented by the government and those submitted by Minshuto (Democratic Party of Japan), the main opposition party. After receiving approval at committee level, the government-proposed bills were immediately sent to the Lower House plenary session for voting in the afternoon. Koizumi’s Liberal Democratic Party and its junior coalition partner New Komeito supported the bills. Minshuto, along with the Japanese Communist Party, the Social Democratic Party and the newly established People’s New Party and New party Nippon, opposed the bills.

Of the total of 480 lawmakers in the Lower House, 17 are former LDP lawmakers who voted against the bills in the previous Lower House plenary session in July. Some now belong to the two new parties or are independent.Of those independent lawmakers, some, including former posts minister Seiko Noda, voted for the bills.

See also this Yomiuri article on the shifting meaning of being a faction leader within the LDP. Of course, we’re still in the midst of the special Diet session, but it’s not surprising that the ripple effects from the Koizumi-led election victory in the summer are already discernible.

The Nikkei reports:

The exchange of opinions between the Japanese and US governments revolving around where to relocate the facilities at the Futenma [USMC] Base in Okinawa, a focal point of the restructuring of US military presence in Japan, is heating up. Negotiations that were initially quiet on the surface have developed into a state in which each side responds with a ringing declaration of its own position. The Japanese government sent Japan Defense Agency [policy] head Kazuo Ofuru to the US on 4 October and is looking for an opening by which to work its way out of the current deadlock, but there is a deep divide between the Japan-side proposal to move operations to the Camp Schwab exercise grounds (the on-land proposal) and the US-side proposal to reclaim shallows for the purpose (the off-shore proposal).

“The US is pushing its off-shore proposal, but we’ve said, ‘It will be very difficult to build [the base] on sea; let’s go with a land base.’ A plan for the same sort of base has also been rejected by voters in Nago [City].”

Takemasa Moriya, Deputy Minister of Defense, revealed to a 3 October press conference that he was very dissatisfied with the US response.

The Futenma facilities in question house helicopter operations, which are a touchy subject on both sides these past few years.

Moriya, BTW, is an interesting character. He’s the highest-level pure bureaucrat at the Japan Defense Agency. (The cabinet ministers themselves, of course, are selected by the Prime Minister and approved by the ruling party, so they tend to come from outside.) He’s very powerful, and he doesn’t mince words–you learn to stop and pay attention when one of his soundbites comes on NHK, because what he says is usually as reliable an indicator as you get of what Japan’s military strategists are thinking. Or at least what they want the Japanese public and the rest of the world to think they’re thinking.

“Don’t make highway privatization a failure,” warns this morning’s Nikkei editorial:

The goal of the Japan Highway Public Corporation was to stop building any more pointless expressways and to decrease debt, now at about ¥40 trillion, as quickly as possible. However, there’s a slim chance that we can hope for much from the new corporation regarding those items.

The new private corporation holds no capital but will stick the nation with its debt balance. New road construction will also be ultimately decided upon by a state council. In this structure, which will be completely under state protection and governance, there will be almost no elements through which discipline will come into play in operations. Plans for the laying of 9342 kilometers [of new roadway] are for the most part complete, and there is a strong possibility that the resulting ballooning debt will be shunted off onto the next generation.

This new company, with its complete reliance on state support, has also shown its true colors to the market. Top managers have been arrested on suspicion of bid-rigging, and the books show nothing resembling a drop in losses from unprofitable roads. Even under these exigent circumstances, Japan Public Highway Corporation bonds have remained stable in value. It all makes it look unlike a corporation that’s about to be privatized.

In a risk-free world, ethical considerations go out the window. At the instruction of the Prime Minister, the Privatization Promotion Committee formed three years ago proposed “complete privatization,” by which buy-off of all assets for the privatized corporation would be accomplished in a projected ten years. But LDP Diet members and the heads of regional government bodies violently opposed the proposal, and it was defanged through the machinations of the Ministry of Land, Transport, and Infrastructure and part of the privatization committee. Perhaps because [interested parties] saw this and felt a sense of confidence in their untouchability, it was at this point that large-scale institutionalized bid-rigging really began to effloresce.

The Nikkei editors want Koizumi to use his surge in popular support to make sure the privatization of the highway corporation stands a chance of being a significant part of government finance reform. I don’t know–Japan Post (speaking of defanged proposals) and highway construction? He’d have to be a miracle worker.

This week’s column by the always-acute Anne Applebaum is even more deadly than usual:

In its scale and sheer disregard for common sense, the Louisiana proposal breaks new ground. But I don’t want to single out Louisiana: After all, the state’s representatives are acting logically, even if they aren’t spending logically. They are playing by the rules of the only system for distributing federal funds that there is, and that system allocates money not according to the dictates of logic, but to the demands of politics and patronage.

Nor does this logic apply only to obvious boondoggles such as federal transportation spending, the last $286 billion tranche of which funded Virginia horse trails, Vermont snowmobile trails, a couple of “bridges to nowhere” in rural Alaska and decorative trees for a California freeway named after Ronald Reagan (a president who once vetoed a transportation bill because it contained too much pork). On the contrary, this logic applies even to things we supposedly consider important, such as homeland security. Because neither the administration nor Congress is prepared to do an honest risk assessment, and because no one dares say that there are states at almost no risk of terrorist attack, a good chunk of homeland security funding is distributed according to formulas that give minimum amounts to every state. The inevitable result: In 2004 the residents of Wyoming received, per capita, seven times more money for first responders than the residents of New York City.

Unfortunately, I can’t identify the buddy who sent it to me–if his unanimously leftist colleagues found out he was communicating with libertarians, they might tar and feather him–but I think I can get away with quoting his parting shot: “I am so glad to live in a democracy that is free from the pork and corruption of Japan’s… (laughing so hard I am crying, or would that be vice versa?).” Uh-huh. The only reason we Americans living in Japan can get away with smirking at the degree of pork-barrel transport and construction spending here is that the federal ministries are so unbelievably profligate they make Washington look frugal by comparison.

As Applebaum says, most people don’t get too exercised over waste on infrastructure because it’s not a very sexy topic. (Prime Minister Koizumi’s push for Japan Post privatization ran into this problem, too–how many citizens want to sit around talking about the financial structure of the postal service?) There’s also the fact that things actually do get built. It’s hard to arouse voters’ ire over poor allocation and inefficient use of resources because those problems are not as easily visible as roads and bridges that don’t materialize. And even boondoggles–perhaps especially boondoggles–provide employment.

Applebaum’s suggestion is this:

But maybe at least it is time for a change of terminology. After all, taking $200 million of public money to build a bridge, name it after yourself and get reelected isn’t merely “pork.” Demanding $250 billion of public money for your hurricane-damaged state–in the hope that voters will ignore all the mistakes you made before the hurricane struck–isn’t just “waste” either. As I say, corruption comes in many forms. But whatever form it comes in, it will be easier for voters to identify if it’s called by its true name.

In an age in which there are news agencies that consider it an affront to call terrorists “terrorists,” I’m not sure the idea will catch on. It’s a good one, though.

Added at 21:24: Virginia Postrel points out that there are non-infrastructure pork provisions that would be much more useful to cut if we meant business about curbing spending. Alex Kerr made a pertinent point a few years ago–though he was speaking of Japan and in a slightly different context:

At a bank in Tokyo, you can make 10 plus 10 equal 30 if you like–but somewhere far away, at a pension fund in Osaka, for example, it may be that 10 plus 10 will now equal only 15. Or even farther away, implications of this equation may require that a stretch of seashore in Hokkaido must be cemented over.

He was speaking of the shell game Japan plays that makes it seem to defy economic laws that obtain elsewhere, but I think he also illustrated one of the reasons it’s hard to get people to think of government spending in big, big, big Jonathan Rauch terms: the different parts of the machine don’t seem to be related to each other. How agricultural subsidies could have implications for homeland security resources, say, is (understandably) not something most people give a lot of thought to. With infrastructure spending, on the other hand, there’s a direct, vivid connection to a current news story with lots of human interest angles. That doesn’t mean that people will necessarily be spurred by Hurricane Katrina to pressure their congresscritters to rein it in a bit, but that seems to be the best hope.

Good news: Japan can stop worrying about the abductee issue, because the UN has totally told North Korea that it needs to cut it out with the human rights abuses and stuff:

On 27 September, UN Secretary General Annan released a report on humanitarian issues in North Korea and indicated that, in addition to engaging in torture and forced labor, the country was also suffering serious food shortages. About the issue of abducted Japanese nationals, he declared that survivors “must be returned to Japan both swiftly and safely.”

The report is 22 pages in all and contains 68 items. About the treatment meted out to citizens who are regarded as criminals by the state, it says, “forced labor is practiced on a large scale.” It went on to cite further examples [of problems]: “When a given person is punished for crimes related to politics or ideology, his or her family also becomes a target for punishment.”

North Korea’s Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs met with Annan last week, stressing that the food situation has improved; he sought a cessation of humanitarian aid and cooperation in development projects. However, the new UN report states that aid is [still] necessary, and says, regarding the way support is being used, that “effective monitoring that will increase transparency” is vitally important.

Well, there you go. Problem solved. And some people complain that Japan gets no return on its hefty contributions to the UN!

You know, it’s hard to be the DPRK. You send a few test missiles over Japan, you sell some nuke technology on the black market, and all of a sudden, everyone’s branding you an aggressor and crap. Luckily, the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs has the set the UN straight about who the real problem in this part of the world is:

Choe Su-hon, the DPRK Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, addressed the United Nations General Assembly on 22 September, declaring that, because the US is continuing its “policy of hostile regard” and aiming to deliver a nuclear first-strike at North Korea, his country “has no choice but to maintain nuclear deterrance capability for purposes of self-defense, as a method of preserving the dignity and sovereignty of our state.”

On the other hand, the Deputy Minister argued that the DPRK’s ultimate goal is “the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” and that it would become unnecessary to possess “even a single nuclear weapon” if relations with the US were normalized. He appealed for…

I can’t believe I’m translating this bilge with a straight face.

…[recognition of] the grave necessity of a doctrine of multilateralism with the UN at its core, [as a way of] mindfully taking refuge from the unilateralism and first strikes of the Bush administration, which had invaded Iraq.

Regarding Japan’s campaign for permanent membership on the UN Security Council, he emphasized that he sees Japan as refusing to atone for “its past crimes [such as during World War II]” against its neighboring countries, and therefore believes that Japan’s request should definitely not be approved.

It may interest people to know that this stuff sounds just as wind-up-lefty and content free in Japanese as in English. What’s also interesting is that the word I translated “atone” is 清算 (seisan: “liquidate”), which I’ve never seen used figuratively. Well, I guess “liquidate” is already figurative, because you don’t actually melt assets and pour them away; I’ve never seen it used outside a financial context. Or maybe I just haven’t noticed.

Added at 16:54: Oh, wait–this was the 次官, not the 副官. I called him the “Vice-Minister,” who’s actually someone else. It’s fixed now.

Added still later: Okay, I guess if I see a word used in a way I haven’t seen, I could do the normal thing and, like, consult a dictionary. It looks as if 清算 would have been rendered more accurately with something closer to a generalized version of “liquidate,” like “deal with conclusively.”

Koizumi has reappointed everyone from his previous cabinet for the remainder of the Diet’s special session; his predicted reshuffle will be made after the next regular session begins in November.

On the Japan Post privatization, which is the main order of business after the selection of the Prime Minister, the Mainichi has this article, which contributes little new information but has an interesting point buried in it:

The main opposition group, the Democratic Party of Japan, expects to come up with its own counterproposal. But that proposal has been delayed by the disarray in the party following a painful defeat in elections and a change in leadership.

The LDP privatization plan, larded as it is with concessions, has plenty of flaws that the DPJ could be trying to exploit. I doubt that it could somehow come up with arguments powerful enough to counter the Koizumi cabinet’s level of public support, but if it started systematically explaining the plan’s weaknesses now, it might be able to begin establishing credibility that would help it later. Unfortunately, it has bigger things to worry about, such as, you know, continuing to exist.

Something else that the government has been working on that the Japanese public, if not most international observers, has been paying attention to is the new asbestos victims’ compensation bill:

The fund will cover the medical costs of those with mesothelioma, lung cancer and other diseases caused by the inhalation of asbestos particles. It will also pay consolation money and cover funeral expenses for family members of those who have died from such diseases.

The bills stipulate that applications for the fund can come from anyone who thinks that his or her disease was caused by asbestos. Family members of workers at factories that used asbestos or those who live near those plants can also apply.

Applications will be accepted at labor standards inspection offices or public health centers, the officials said.

The story has been gaining steam since spring.

It is to be hoped that the asbestos fund won’t end up being milked by enterprising false claimants. Cf. today’s disclosure about two nuclear power corporations:

The Japan Nuclear Cycle Development Institute and the Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute were revealed on 22 September to have illegally paid over 120 million yen to employees who were not actually eligible to for benefits for those who work with radiation. There were workplaces in which such illegal disbursement was routine.

From April 2002 to May of this year, the JNC paid out 119.55 million to 604 employees; the JAERI, 9.41 million yen to 113 employees. The greatest amount to a single employee was 600,000 yen. Both organizations will require the employees involved who have not retired to return all the money.

The benefits to those who work with radiation are to be paid when the number of days [a worker] has entered into a radiation control zone exceeds a fixed monthly figure. Payments are made based on the work attendance logs employees keep, but those logs were not systematically verified through comparison with sign-in/sign-out sheets at the radiation control zones.

In this context, the motto displayed on the JNC’s website is darkly (radiantly?) comical. It must be very easy to fake 出勤簿 (shukkinbo: “work attendance log”) at large companies where payroll is handled far from workstations.

Japan isn’t entirely happy with the results of the 6-party talks, however. The abductee problem was basically tabled:

On 19 September, the families of Japanese abducted by the DPRK held a Tokyo press conference in reaction to the joint statement adopted at the 6-party talks, voicing dissatisfaction: “The abduction issue was back-burnered.” “This is nothing more than a statement predicated on the Japan-DPRK Pyongyang Declaration, which is already drained of content.”

The only part of the joint declaration to touch on the abduction issue was this: “After dealing appropriately, in accordance with the Japan-DPRK Pyongyang Declaration, with various pending issues, we will implement a normalization of relations.” The vice-representative of the group of families, Shigeo Iizuka (67), made plain his dissatisfaction: “The word abduction doesn’t appear in the declaration, and the abduction issue was back-burnered.” He indicated further concerns: “If the debate over nuclear issues goes on and on, and and there is no progress seen, the resolution of the abduction issue could become a great deal more difficult.”

If you’re not familiar with the issue: the DPRK sent agents to the Japanese coast in the 1970s to abduct about a dozen Japanese nationals in their late teens and early 20s. They were brought back to North Korea and forced to teach Japanese language and culture to DPRK spies. Of course, those who are alive are all middle-aged now. The most famous, because her husband happened to be US Army deserter Charles Jenkins, is Hitomi Soga. Their ending was happy: they’ve come back to Japan and been able to bring their college-age daughters. Other endings have not been happy. Megumi Yokota’s family has probably been treated the worst, with the DPRK dismissively shoving random piles of bones at the Japanese as her remains. Other stories are in between. Kaoru Hasuike, for instance, was snatched while on vacation in Hokkaido as a college junior. Having been repatriated at 46, he received permission from his university to complete his degree but was having difficulty deciding on how to proceed–and do you wonder? There are, I think, five of the fifteen abductees accounted for.

For reference, the Ministry of Foreign affairs has the Japan-DPRK Pyongyang Declaration, from almost exactly two years ago, posted in Japanese and English. The section pertinent to the abduction issue is rendered this way in English:

With respect to the outstanding issues of concern related to the lives and security of Japanese nationals, the DPRK side confirmed that it would take appropriate measures so that these regrettable [遺憾な!–SRK] incidents, that took place under the abnormal bilateral relationship, would never happen in the future.

Well, the DPRK doesn’t seem to have abducted anyone lately, but it certainly is maintaining an “abnormal” sense of cooperation. At the same time, it’s not hard to understand why the nuclear issue superseded the abductee issue at the 6-party talks. However much the Japanese citizenry feels for the families of the abductees, the fact is that the nuclear problem could directly affect millions of people. The abductee problem, while an outrage, does not. Bilateral negotiations between Japan and the DPRK don’t seem to fare much better much of the time, unfortunately, so Iizuka’s fears may not be unfounded.