TOKYO, Sept. 7, 2023—In ‘The Bad Sleep Well’ film part 2, Fumio Kishida, who is dubbed one of the most incompetent Japanese prime ministers, is poised to retain his top aide, Seiji Kihara, a former Ministry of Finance bureaucrat whose wife is under police investigation related to a mysterious murder case. Prospects of this appointment, if formalized in a soon-to-be-executed cabinet reshuffle, are already having a far-reaching rippling effect, embracing not only politics but the country’s fiscal and monetary policy: a stock market rise and the yen’s fall, for one.
‘The Bad’ is not Kishida. He serves exactly like ‘a figurehead shogun’ during the closing period of the Edo period ended in the 1860s when just about everything was decided by the ‘Roju,’ or senior samurai councilors, including politics and concubines.
The contemporary ‘Bad’ is not a single person, as had been during much of the 270-year-long Tokugawa Shogun reins. They are a hybrid group of old guards from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and bureaucrats from key ministries, notably the MoF, the Ministry of Economy Trade and Industry, the National Police Agency and a few others.
Kihara had visited an LDP kingmaker after the Japanese weekly magazine Shukan Shincho began reporting about his wife’s alleged involvement in a murder case of 17 years ago, news reports have said. The kingmaker told Kihara not to worry about the reports, telling him, ‘I’ll take care of the case… You do your own work.’
The kingmaker as promised apparently told the present head of the National Police Agency, Yasuhiro Tsuyuki, to close the murder case, as well as Shunichi Kuryu, who is a deputy cabinet secretary working closely with Kihara. The NPA told the investigators of Tokyo’s Otsuka Police Station to stop the probe.
While avoiding the media, Kihara since then has been busy drafting policy papers for Kishida, making speeches at seminars, attending government policy commission meetings to sell Kishida’s socio-economic policy called the ‘new capitalism.’
The Bad had told police to arrest a lower house parliamentarian, Masaaki Akimoto, and on Sept. 7, they nabbed him for bribery. His arrest is widely viewed as an intimidation to other non main stream lawmakers from Kishida’s Liberal Democratic Party that have been overshadowed by a prolonged party control by the faction of the gunned-down prime minister Shinzo Abe and his cronies and are increasingly distanced from visible posts. ‘Akimoto is a sacrifice lamb,’ a columnist for a leading Japanese newspaper told me.
The Bad Roju LDP politicians and pro-LDP bureaucrats are rapidly expanding their reach, to many corners of Japanese socio-economic life, including financial and monetary policies and keeping Japanese government finances even more lax and interest rates at virtually zero.
On Sept. 6, vice finance minister for international affairs Masato Kanda, who has the ultimate authority for currency intervention, only reiterated that Japan would deploy every option to stabilize the yen, which dropped to nearly 148 to the U.S. dollar. Bank of Japan governor Kazuno Ueda has been mum about the financial market.
What was once hoisted as Japanese bureaucrats’ top priority – fiscal austerity – meanwhile has disappeared from their desks. On the Aug. 31 deadline, ministries and agencies submitted steeply-inflated fiscal 2024 requests , aggregating a record 114.3 trillion yen, from 111 trillion yen in the previous high of 2022. That’s not a small rise for a country where population is shrinking rapidly.
Bureaucrats no longer feel obligated to compile tight budget requests and instead plot for big numbers for creating work for themselves, the columnist said.
Japan is a perfect example where bureaucracy and bureaucrats-turned politicians thrive.
###