Let he who is without gin cast the first stone

Urban Dirt's two cents on the Sloshed Supremo is running on Timesonline, but here it is again for the benefit of UD subscribers.

For a few hours on Sunday, it seemed that Shoichi Nakagawa might get away with his mangled moments  at that press conference in Rome. Why? Because democracy in Japan simply wasn’t working.

The now infamous footage of his pathetic battle with chemistry was only a short, barely analysed, story towards the end of the news. Japanese people went to bed with the usual “shikata ga nai” – “it can’t be helped” – shrug of the shoulders and a satisfied sense that all politicians are basically idiots.

Even when they woke to read the papers, Mr Nakagawa’s crime seemed fairly minor – mainly because the local press was loyally buying the official spin about cough mixture and jetlag. The Japanese public shrugged again and satisfied themselves with the words of an ancient Japanese proverb: “tabi no haji wa kaki shite” – “the traveller discards his sense of shame”. The Finance Minister’s disgrace, after all, took place thousands of miles away.

But then, partly courtesy of the internet, it all turned sour. Certainly, the millions of clicks on the online footage of the incident made Mr Nakagawa’s position more untenable by the second. But the public was riled by something even more infuriating: the way that the mainstream Japanese media was dealing with the story.

Morning newspapers – all of which employ armies of journalists to cover ministers’ every move – were left quoting the coverage of the incident in The Times, because it was easier to report that we were saying the minister looked “incapably drunk” than to say it themselves. The Japanese public may be docile, but they know when they are being let down by the fourth estate.

Suddenly, there was no shortage of people – MPs, Cabinet ministers, former prime ministers, bureaucrats and business leaders – prepared to go on air, shake their heads sadly and declare that they had known for some time that Mr Nakagawa had a liking for booze that may not have been under control.

That really was too much for the Japanese public and, to judge by the traffic on the web chatrooms, they are not going to take this one with a shrug. Every person who has emerged as a post-fact whistleblower on Mr Nakagawa’s drinking issues is, perhaps unwittingly, making themselves a legitimate target for the same criticism levelled against the former Finance Minister.

All of those timid accusers, pointing their fingers from the safety of Mr Nakagawa’s resignation had, in both democratic and patriotic terms, a duty to say something in public much earlier if they thought that the world’s second biggest economy had a drunkard at the wheel. If they thought that it didn’t matter, they are doubly culpable.

Comments

[Jakeyboy]

Drunkards have a fine history of leading a nation. Look at Winston Churchill in your country; Look at George W. Bush in the United States.

To the western eye, he probably appears to be an out-of-control alkie. In the Far East, it's seen differently.

It's well known, amongst the boys in the press clubs that Nakagawa is an adherent of Drunken Monkey Kung-Fu, a popularized in the Jackie Chan movie. You know, it's the martial art where the drunker you are, the more powerful you become. He, like Prime Minister Aso, is a staunch Jackie Chan fan and simply applying the principles of DMKF to the political arena. Rather than be condemned, he should be rewarded for his daring experiment. He's not a disgrace to Japan--he's a Japanese Churchill. The mainstream press understands this. It's a shame that a few dozen know-nothing barbaric bloggers and eurocentric journalists would sully his image and his honor.
I only hope the Japanese people have the sense to stick behind him. Ganbatte, Shoichi-kun.