Where Everybody's Crazy

Warning - this is politics. Good evangelical missionaries don't talk about politics, so pretend this post doesn't exist.

Just when I decided to take a nice relaxing holiday, our prime minister resigns. And now he's in hospital. Nobody is quite sure why, and indeed why now, although I have to admit I did see it coming - I've been studying his leadership style as preparation for my seminar at the end of the month, and a week or so ago, the Asahi Shinbun had some quotes about his leadership being "invisible". He had already taken his hands off the wheel.

But why resign? Well, there are a number of factors at play. He's had consistently bad luck with cabinet ministers, from those who said that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were, on the whole, a good idea, to those who said that the best thing women could do is get on with their duty of having children. That was hardly his fault, though, but it did rather put his judgment into question.

Then there was the pensions thing. That was a bit sad. It just kept getting worse and worse - I was reading about the latest revelation on Tuesday in the Yomiuri Shinbun. The story so far is that the government has lost a load of pension records - not that it can actually pay them anyway. But this time around, it turns out that, for about half a million pension records, the government don't have the names, sexes or dates of birth of the policy holders. Which is, you would think, something they would take care to note down. The Department of Social Security have been unable to provide an explanation, and the best guess is that when the punched cards were transfered onto magnetic tape, they didn't transfer the indexes to the cards, just the card data itself. Yeah, right. Anyway, that's still not Abe's fault but also looks pretty bad.

Then they lost the upper house elections. That was mainly because of the pensions thing, but there were other things going on as well, including a big hard lurch to the right in terms of constitutional reform.

Because they lost the upper house elections, Abe needed to force through legislation using two votes in the lower house to get things done. One of the things he really wanted to get done was to provide an Enabling Act for the presence of the Japanese Navy (yeah, yeah, "Seaborne Self-Defence Force", I know.) in the Persian Gulf. They're there providing refuelling support to American combat operations, and unfortunately one of the lawmakers noticed that this was illegal. Busted! But since we're doing the whole Global War On Terror thing here as well, despite it having nothing to do with us, the government kind of needs to make it legal, and quickly. But the opposition parties - now in the majority in the upper house - won't play ball. The government could force it through the lower house twice but that would look like an extremely naughty way to legitimize something that's kind of illegal to begin with. And besides, the upper house said "you do that and we'll pass a censure motion."

So on Tuesday afternoon Abe's advisers asked him what he planned to do about all this, and he told them that he planned to resign. Now he's gone into hospital and everyone's saying it's health related. It might be health related. It might also be due to a complete loss of confidence in the government. You choose.

Anyway, the bad news is that the guy tipped to replace him, Taro Aso, is, if anything, going to be more of the same. If not worse.