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The Saffron Revolution?

"It is a fascinating moment, fraught with promise, when this spirit of the times, dozing pitifully and apathetically, like a huge wet bird on a branch, suddenly and without a clear reason ... takes off in bold and joyful flight. We all hear the shush of this flight. It stirs our imagination and gives us energy: we begin to act."

Ryszard Kapuscinski

Read: 'Nuns join Saffron Revolution'

Man of the moment

Below I attach my piece about Homer "Yasuo Fukuda" Simpson from this morning's paper. It's written in the assumption that he will defeat Julie "Taro Aso" Walters in Sunday's LDP presidential election, and such assumptions can be very dangerous, of course. But the only thing that could stop Mr Fukuda now would be a full-scale three-in-a-bed, coke'n'tarts sex scandal. I think we can agree that he is not the type. (Aso, on the other hand . . .)

My first assumption was that Fukuda's reluctance was just a pose, a conventional piece of pseudo-humility. Now, though, I'm persuaded by it. I think that he genuinely didn't particularly want to be prime minister. Whether that is a good or a bad thing remains to be seen.

[Thanks to Camera Otoko, Fi-Wi and Sarah for Homer and Julie.]

Doh! Politics update

Were we wrong all along about the secret identity of Yasuo Fukuda? Leo and I concluded that he is Eric Morecambe. Jun Okumura, mighty among Japan political bloggers, observed his resemblance to John Major. But has the truth eluded us all along?

Can anyone seriously deny that this man:

is really this man:

Ministry of Mixed Metaphors

From a British newspaper this morning:

The mantra that Japan is moving towards a two-party system may be a chimera.

Mmm . . . which amounts to saying  that this (click here to listen to the mantra)

may be this

How's that then?

The Killers in the Killing Fields

I have never seen the sites of the Nazi Holocaust, but S-21, the Khmer Rouge prison and torture centre in Phnom Penh, is one of the most impressive and disturbing memorials to a historical event that I've ever visited. I thought of it again yesterday after the arrest of Nuon Chea, "Brother Number Two" to Pol Pot, and the man held by some historians as most responsible for 200,000 executions carried out by the Khmer Rouge.

As a place of commemoration, it derives its power from its modesty: the banal location in the quiet Tuol Sleng suburb; the shabbiness of the concrete cells and the crudeness of the clumsily forged bars and shackles; and above all, the hundreds of black and white photographs (of 6000 which survive) of the doomed prisoners simply displayed on the walls.

Immediately after my own visit I read Voices from S-1: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison by David Chandler, which is remarkable for combining scholarship with compellingly personal reflection on the broadest significance of the cruelty which was practised there. "As a historian and a student of literature I have tried over the years to control the data I deal with and to comprehend the writings that I read," he records. "When I have immersed myself in the S-21 archive, the terror lurking inside it has pushed me around, blunted my skills, and eroded my self-assurance. The experience at times has been akin to drowning."

Give Him Sunshine

I am cursing myself for missing it, but I cannot tell a lie: my talented colleague Leo Lewis spotted it first here. After a year under the leadership of the actor Tom Conti, the next prime minister of Japan looks most likely to be another icon of the British showbiz scene. You thought he'd died in 1984, but yesterday he was back, launching his campaign for the leadership of the Liberal Democratic Party under the unconvincing alias "Yasuo Fukuda". Isn't it obvious that this man:

is in fact -

- Eric Morecambe!

Apologies for the quality of the image. To increase the resolution, just screw up your eyes and squint a bit.

But what about his opponent? Who is this "Taro Aso" character, and what is his true identity?

After a certain amount of timewasting, er, brainstorming, Leo and I have come up with the following possibilities:

Fukuda/Aso, Aso/Fukuda

One of these days I must post on something other than politics, but the situation in Nagatacho (Tokyo's equivalent of Westminster) is so fast moving and unpredictable that it is difficult to think about much else.

In essence, this is the situation this afternoon:

Yasuo Fukuda, licensed to thrill

Richard Lloyd Parry
Tokyo

Japan’s nationalist right-wing is under assault after Yasuo Fukuda, a moderate within the ruling Liberal Democratic Party emerged as a challenger to the conservative favourite, Taro Aso, for the job of prime minister.

Mr Fukuda (pictured left, in his earlier job as a ninja), who favours greater engagement with Japan’s Asian neighbours and opposes visits to the controversial Yasukuni war shrine, will announce his candidacy for the leadership of the LDP today, according to Japanese television, a job that guarantees election to the post of prime minister.

Yesterday the outgoing prime minister, Shinzo Abe, whose sudden resignation on Wednesday brought about the political crisis, was admitted to hospital suffering from inflamed bowels, extreme weakness and stress. Although he technically remains in charge until a successor is chosen, his sudden abandonment of his post has provoked dismay and anger, and left Japan effectively leaderless at a time of intense political conflict.

Japan’s finance minister, Fukushiro Nukaga, became the first member of the LDP formally to announce his candidacy for the leadership election which will be held on 23 September. Sadakazu Tanigaki, another moderate and former finance minister, may also step forward when nominations are filed today. But it is the prospect of a battle between Mr Fukuda and Mr Aso, in opposite ideological corners of the ruling party, that will be the focus of excitement over the next week.

On a drip

UPDATE BELOW!

Shinzo Abe - who technically remains prime minister until the election of his successor - has gone to hospital "because he feels unwell", according to the chief cabinet secretary, Kaoru Yosano. At this point, we are told, there is no question of his duties being taken over by a deputy (this would be Yosano himself), as they were, for example, after ex-PM Keizo Obuchi's fatal stroke in 2000.

The most striking lines in the brief report on Kyodo News are:

According to sources close to the prime minister, Abe has recently been suffering from a weak stomach, and porridge has been a source of nourishment.

During his visit to India and other Asian countries in August, he specially asked for food that was easy to digest, and not the spicy local cuisine, the sources said.

After he returned from his Asian tour, he sometimes received intravenous fluids at the prime minister's official residence, they said.

It would be easy to read too much into this. Japanese doctors whip out the saline drip at the slightest excuse (stubbed toes, chilblains, tennis elbow etc). And going into hospital - usually in a wheelchair with one of those old biddy rugs folded across the knee - is one of the standard, sympathy-buying responses of politicians and businessmen to imminent criminal investigations and scandals, such as the one allgedly bearing down on Shinzo. (for more on all of this see my news story in today's paper).

But could this be more serious?

The long sayonara

My hunch about Shinzo Abe (a.k.a. Tom Conti, a.k.a.Scarecrow) proved to be right. His death (politically speaking) on the night of the Upper House election in July was being covered up the Soviet Communist/Liberal Democratic Party hierarchs in order to maintain the peace and stability of the Motherland/Beautiful Country. In the weeks since the disastrous reshuffle, however, the best efforts of the LDP embalmers have not been able to prevent putrefaction, and Taro Aso (LDP Secretary-General) and Kaoru Yosano (Chief Cabinet Secretary) have decided to give him a decent burial.

Shinzo Abe has resigned - or rather announced his intention of resigning as soon as someone is appointed to take his place.

Rather embarassingly, I was in Seoul when all this happened. I write this in Gimpo airport waiting for the afternoon flight back to Tokyo. So here are my - necessarily, not fully informed - thoughts.

1) This was inevitable. Looking back it is bizarre that Abe held on for this long after such a historic trouncing in the Upper House elections. It must be taken as a sign of discombobulation and panic within the LDP, that the Abe fiasco has been allowed to drag on like this. In the old days, the LDP as a party was always bigger and more powerful than individual prime ministers. If one of them became a liability, the vigorous imune system of the party organism would excret them and place someone better suited to the moment in their place. Junichiro Koizumi's great achievement as prime minister was to increase the power of the prime minister's office, and show the LDP who was boss - and people loved it. But the new balance of power depends on having someone with the sharp wits and commanding personality of Junichiro Koizumi. During Abe's turn in office, both party and leader are enfeebled.

2) Taro Aso will probably be the next prime minister, but it is not a certainty. He is a good communicator, deft and confident (if a bit lordly and arrogant), and has something of the henjin (eccentric. weirdo) quality which distinguished Koizumi and which Japanese have come rather to like in their leaders. But, as Tobias Harris points out at Observing Japan, the chaos which this sudden announcement will create presents opportunities for an outsider to swoop in, much as Koizumi did in the mess of the Mori government.

3) The opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) under Ichiro Ozawa are stronger than ever. This is their resignation, the biggest political victory they have had in years, just what Ozawa needs to rally the troops and overcome the gaping divisions among their factions. With Abe's entrails smeared on their sweaty faces, his head impaled on a war spear, they will go into battle in the Diet more berserk and blood crazed than ever . . .

They're calling my flight . . .

Peace in our time

Last year, in an essay on the writer, Donald Richie, I remarked on an interesting aspect of intellectual life in Japan: the absence of an lasting work of ex-patriate literature, of a gaijin to match Kipling, Somerset Maugham, Hemingway or Paul Bowles. It's too early to be sure, but I think I may have found one. He's 40 years old, he comes from Ossett in West Yorkshire, and his name is David Peace.

Mr Peace has lived in Tokyo for 13 years. Steadily and quietly, he has built a reputation with six uncompromising and distinctive works of fiction: the Red Riding Quarter, four novels about the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper, GB84, about the Miners' Strike and The Damned United about Brian Clough and Leeds United. I haven't read his earlier books (except for an extract in Granta - David Peace was one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists in their last reckoning of that list four years ago). I will now. His latest novel, Tokyo Year Zero, is the best novel in English about Japan that I have seen.

I wish that I had time to write a full, formal review because there is much to say. It needs to be pointed out at the start that this kind of writing is not everyone's bag of senbei. On the face of it, it is a historical crime novel, based on the true story of Yoshio Kodaira, a prodigious sex murderer of US-occupied Tokyo (whose tale is also told, briefly, but rather effectively, in Mark Schreiber's Shocking Crimes of Post-War Japan), and the Tokyo detectives who investigated his crimes. There is a developing plot, much suspense, and a denouement in which things are revealed to have been not what they seemed. But crime fiction in itself has never interested me all that much, and the brilliance of this book lies not in its plotting, but in its language, and the atmosphere which it conveys - the clotted, choking, migraine world of Tokyo in August 1946, a product not only of the intense physical heat, but of the neurotic, guilt-stricken atmosphere of fear and lies in the year after the end of the war.

What has become of Comrade Abe?

In the good old days of the 1980s, as the Soviet Union was sagging to its doom, the country was led by a series of men about whom it could charitably be said that they might as well have been dead.

For months at a time, they would be invisible except as signatures at the bottom of official communiques, or distant figures saluting stiffly from balconies and reviewing platforms. Later, it would emerge that the men in charge of one of the world's biggest nuclear arsenals had been ill and incapable for years.

And yet the absence of a paramount leader did not create a crisis. The USSR lumbered on, sustained by the sheer mass and weight of its bureacracy, a beast that lived and breathed even without a head. And so it is now in Japan, 25 years later, where the successor to Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, clings on to power on a political life support machine -

- Shinzo Abe.