Jun 01, 2007
By Kevin Rafferty
South China Morning Post (Hong Kong)
A minister's suicide has thrown light on the corruption that still pervades Japanese politics, writes Kevin Rafferty
The suicide of agriculture minister Toshikatsu Matsuoka should sound alarm bells about the potential perils ahead for Japanese politics. According to historians and social scientists, the nation has traditionally been careful to avoid ideology. Chie Nakane, the prominent anthropologist, contrasted Japan and China in this way: "The Japanese way of thinking depends on the situation rather than principle - while, with the Chinese, it is the other way around ... We Japanese have no principles. Some people think we hide our intentions, but we have no intentions to hide. Except for a few leftists and rightists, we have no dogma and don't ourselves know where we are going ..."
Today, Japan is in the dangerous position of having a prime minister, in Shinzo Abe, with an ideology - yet the country still does not know where it is going.
Mr Abe's mission has two aspects that don't easily fit together and don't make a full canvas on which to create a national polity. His often-declared mantra is to recreate Japan as a "beautiful country". But his undeclared driving force - his personal ideology - is to pay homage to his grandfather politician at whose knee he first learned his politics.
In a sense his grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, does not need rehabilitation by Mr Abe. He went from being a member of the cabinet that declared war in 1941 to being imprisoned as a Class-A war criminal before his phoenix-like political rebirth as co-founder of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and, finally, prime minister of Japan 50 years ago.
Some commentators were surprised that when Mr Abe took over from Junichiro Koizumi, last year, he chose to make his first foreign trip to China rather than the US. They said that this displayed a refreshing sense of independence and a new understanding of the world.
But, in fact, Mr Abe was taking a leaf from his grandfather's book. Kishi's first trips as prime minister were to Southeast Asia; only later did he go to the US.
Kishi's later achievement was to redress the balance of relations with Washington. But he died with his political agenda unfulfilled, which is where Mr Abe enters - dangerously.
Kishi called repeatedly for the eradication of all the after-effects of the US post-war occupation and the recovery of genuine independence, code words for getting rid of the occupiers. But the US-drafted constitution is still a sore point and stumbling block on that road to full sovereign independence in Mr Abe's mind.
The prime minister does face opposition. Some supporters of the present constitution believe it should be enshrined as a national treasure or even as one of the seven wonders of the modern world. In contrast to the performance of President George W. Bush's America in Iraq today, the US occupiers in Japan brought a peace and freedom that Japanese had not known for decades.
The controversial "no-war" clause allowed Japan to devote its energies to rebuilding its economy without worrying about its armed forces. That clause, which Mr Abe is keen to scrap, also allowed the Japanese to present themselves as unique, victims of the atomic bomb who had renounced weapons - and many Japanese would like to keep that precious claim to peace.
If Mr Abe gets his way, the new constitution will not be a document by the people, but a charter drawn up by the right-wing political elite for the people - but one in which they have onerous duties to be patriotic and recapture the lost Bushido spirit of ancient Japan. It is a dangerous path to be treading, especially under the leadership of Mr Abe and his right-wing ideologues, in a rapidly changing world.
There are a couple of sharp ironies here. One is that Mr Abe's own credentials for leading the change are thin. He became prime minister with a commanding majority, not through his own popularity, but because of deals struck in the dark, smoke-filled LDP rooms.
More important is that, although Mr Abe talks of creating a "beautiful country", his recent policies have taken him slavishly close to the US. He declared that Washington and Tokyo share "universal values" and is trying to modify the terms of engagement of Japan's military so that it can come to the assistance of US forces.
Cynics might suggest that Mr Abe is following former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger's realpolitik advice to Japan to stay close to the US until America becomes weak, and then to cut a deal with China. But it hardly adds to Japan's "beauty" to be in the shadow of Washington, or Beijing.
Worse, Matsuoka was appointed agriculture minister even though he represented agricultural interests and was suspected of receiving money from forestry road contracts in a bid-rigging scandal. He killed himself hours before he was due to face questioning in parliament.
Right up to his death, Mr Abe, who had pledged to create a clean and fresh government, supported Matsuoka to the hilt. After news of his death emerged, Mr Abe praised him for getting China to resume imports of Japanese rice.
The response of the Japanese public has been to send the government's popularity plummeting, but there is an air of resignation that all politicians are corrupt.
What is most worrying is that these men are mostly corrupt and that, armed with a new constitution, they could be a danger to themselves as well as to the rest of the world.
It would be nice to think that Japan had real friends among the Group of Eight which meets next week. Japan needs some sensible advice about the way to create a fresh and clean agenda. The problem is, it's unclear who has a clear conscience and clean hands.
Kevin Rafferty is author of Inside Japan's Powerhouses, a study of Japan Inc and internationalisation.
The suicide of agriculture minister Toshikatsu Matsuoka should sound alarm bells about the potential perils ahead for Japanese politics. According to historians and social scientists, the nation has traditionally been careful to avoid ideology. Chie Nakane, the prominent anthropologist, contrasted Japan and China in this way: "The Japanese way of thinking depends on the situation rather than principle - while, with the Chinese, it is the other way around ... We Japanese have no principles. Some people think we hide our intentions, but we have no intentions to hide. Except for a few leftists and rightists, we have no dogma and don't ourselves know where we are going ..."
Today, Japan is in the dangerous position of having a prime minister, in Shinzo Abe, with an ideology - yet the country still does not know where it is going.
Mr Abe's mission has two aspects that don't easily fit together and don't make a full canvas on which to create a national polity. His often-declared mantra is to recreate Japan as a "beautiful country". But his undeclared driving force - his personal ideology - is to pay homage to his grandfather politician at whose knee he first learned his politics.
In a sense his grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, does not need rehabilitation by Mr Abe. He went from being a member of the cabinet that declared war in 1941 to being imprisoned as a Class-A war criminal before his phoenix-like political rebirth as co-founder of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and, finally, prime minister of Japan 50 years ago.
Some commentators were surprised that when Mr Abe took over from Junichiro Koizumi, last year, he chose to make his first foreign trip to China rather than the US. They said that this displayed a refreshing sense of independence and a new understanding of the world.
But, in fact, Mr Abe was taking a leaf from his grandfather's book. Kishi's first trips as prime minister were to Southeast Asia; only later did he go to the US.
Kishi's later achievement was to redress the balance of relations with Washington. But he died with his political agenda unfulfilled, which is where Mr Abe enters - dangerously.
Kishi called repeatedly for the eradication of all the after-effects of the US post-war occupation and the recovery of genuine independence, code words for getting rid of the occupiers. But the US-drafted constitution is still a sore point and stumbling block on that road to full sovereign independence in Mr Abe's mind.
The prime minister does face opposition. Some supporters of the present constitution believe it should be enshrined as a national treasure or even as one of the seven wonders of the modern world. In contrast to the performance of President George W. Bush's America in Iraq today, the US occupiers in Japan brought a peace and freedom that Japanese had not known for decades.
The controversial "no-war" clause allowed Japan to devote its energies to rebuilding its economy without worrying about its armed forces. That clause, which Mr Abe is keen to scrap, also allowed the Japanese to present themselves as unique, victims of the atomic bomb who had renounced weapons - and many Japanese would like to keep that precious claim to peace.
If Mr Abe gets his way, the new constitution will not be a document by the people, but a charter drawn up by the right-wing political elite for the people - but one in which they have onerous duties to be patriotic and recapture the lost Bushido spirit of ancient Japan. It is a dangerous path to be treading, especially under the leadership of Mr Abe and his right-wing ideologues, in a rapidly changing world.
There are a couple of sharp ironies here. One is that Mr Abe's own credentials for leading the change are thin. He became prime minister with a commanding majority, not through his own popularity, but because of deals struck in the dark, smoke-filled LDP rooms.
More important is that, although Mr Abe talks of creating a "beautiful country", his recent policies have taken him slavishly close to the US. He declared that Washington and Tokyo share "universal values" and is trying to modify the terms of engagement of Japan's military so that it can come to the assistance of US forces.
Cynics might suggest that Mr Abe is following former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger's realpolitik advice to Japan to stay close to the US until America becomes weak, and then to cut a deal with China. But it hardly adds to Japan's "beauty" to be in the shadow of Washington, or Beijing.
Worse, Matsuoka was appointed agriculture minister even though he represented agricultural interests and was suspected of receiving money from forestry road contracts in a bid-rigging scandal. He killed himself hours before he was due to face questioning in parliament.
Right up to his death, Mr Abe, who had pledged to create a clean and fresh government, supported Matsuoka to the hilt. After news of his death emerged, Mr Abe praised him for getting China to resume imports of Japanese rice.
The response of the Japanese public has been to send the government's popularity plummeting, but there is an air of resignation that all politicians are corrupt.
What is most worrying is that these men are mostly corrupt and that, armed with a new constitution, they could be a danger to themselves as well as to the rest of the world.
It would be nice to think that Japan had real friends among the Group of Eight which meets next week. Japan needs some sensible advice about the way to create a fresh and clean agenda. The problem is, it's unclear who has a clear conscience and clean hands.
Kevin Rafferty is author of Inside Japan's Powerhouses, a study of Japan Inc and internationalisation.
5 comments:
Poor Dr. Lao, it sounds like he
suffers from a serious dellusion
from being in the UK for too long.
Had Japan seen Cambodia plagued
with corruption, they would not
have been our biggest donors. Japan
has been monitoring their aids very
closely and they had not complaint
about corruption in Cambodia so
far.
Yes, but Matsuoka has the decency to step down to Hell. Will ah Hun Sen follow the role model?
One time, he said, he'll cut his neck...
Noope, we'll waited for the right
candidate before we step anywhere.
Mr. 6:08AM,
Below is more food for your thought from Japan.
Enjoy reading it and let me know your thought about it.
LAO Mong Hay, Hong Kong
New York Times Company May 11, 2007
Confessions, Criminal justice, Judicial process, Legal reform, False arrests & convictions
The suspects in a vote-buying case in this small town in western Japan were subjected to repeated interrogations and, in several instances, months of pretrial detention. The police ordered one woman to shout her confession out a window and forced one man to stomp on the names of his loved ones.
In all, 13 men and women, ranging in age from their early 50s to mid-70s, were arrested and indicted. Six buckled and confessed to an elaborate scheme of buying votes with liquor, cash and catered parties. One man died during the trial -- from the stress, the others said -- and another tried to kill himself.
But all were acquitted this year in a local district court, which found that their confessions had been entirely fabricated. The presiding judge said the defendants had ''made confessions in despair while going through marathon questioning.''
The Japanese authorities have long relied on confessions to take suspects to court, instead of building cases based on solid evidence. Human rights groups have criticized the practice for leading to abuses of due process and convictions of innocent people.
But in recent months developments in this case and two others have shown just how far the authorities will go in securing confessions. Calls for reforms in the criminal justice system have increased, even as Japan is to adopt a jury-style system in 2009 and is considering allowing victims and their relatives to question defendants in court.
In Saga Prefecture in March, a high court upheld the acquittal of a man who said he had been coerced into confessing to killing three women in the late 1980s. The court found that there was no evidence against the man other than the confession, which had been extracted from him after 17 days of interrogations that went on more than 10 hours a day.
In Toyama Prefecture the police acknowledged early this year that a taxi driver who had served almost three years in prison for rape and attempted rape in 2002 was innocent, after they found the real culprit. The driver said he had been browbeaten into affixing his fingerprint to a confession drawn up by the police after three days of interrogation.
''I Just Didn't Do It,'' a new documentary by Masayuki Suo, the director of ''Shall We Dance?'' has also raised popular awareness of coerced confessions. The documentary is based on the real-life story of a young man who was falsely accused of groping a teenage girl on the Tokyo subway and imprisoned for 14 months. It portrays how the authorities extract confessions, whether the accused are guilty or not.
''Traditionally in Japan, confessions have been known as the king of evidence,'' said Kenzo Akiyama, a lawyer who is a former judge. ''Especially if it's a big case, even if the accused hasn't done anything, the authorities will seek a confession through psychological torture.''
The law allows the police to detain suspects for up to 23 days without an indictment. Suspects have almost no contact with the outside world and are subject to constant interrogation, a practice that has long drawn criticism from organizations like the United Nations Human Rights Committee and Amnesty International.
Suspects are strongly pressed to plead guilty, on the premise that confession is the first step toward rehabilitation.
The conviction rate in Japanese criminal cases -- 99.8 percent -- cannot be compared directly with that of the United States, because there is no plea bargaining in Japan and prosecutors bring only those cases they are confident of winning. But experts say that in court, where acquittals are considered harmful to the careers of prosecutors and judges alike, there is a presumption of guilt.
In Tokyo, the National Police Agency acknowledged mistakes in the vote-buying case here in Shibushi but defended the system. ''We do not think that this is the kind of thing that happens all the time,'' said Yasuhiro Shirakawa of the agency's Criminal Investigation Bureau.
''It is not only about confessions,'' he added. ''We always inspect whether there is corroborating evidence and whether what the suspects said is true or not.''
In Shibushi, the authorities have gone unpunished, as have those in the two other cases. In a written reply, the police said they had followed the law in their investigation but seriously took the verdict to heart.
It remains unclear what set off the investigation in 2003 of the campaign of a local politician, Shinichi Nakayama, who was elected for the first time to the local assembly that year, beating the protege of a longtime power broker.
The police started by accusing Sachio Kawabata -- whose wife, Junko, is the assemblyman's cousin -- of giving cases of beer to a construction company in return for votes. Mr. Kawabata said he had given the beer because the company had sent guests to an inn that he owned.
Mr. Kawabata soon found himself enduring nearly 15 hours of interrogation a day. Locked in a tiny room with an inspector who shouted and threatened, he refused to confess.
So on the third day, Mr. Kawabata recalled, the inspector scribbled the names of his family members on three pieces of paper. He added messages -- ''Grandpa, please hurry up and become an honest grandpa,'' and ''I don't remember raising you to be this kind of person'' -- and told Mr. Kawabata to repent.
Drawing no confession after an hour, the inspector grabbed Mr. Kawabata by the ankles and made him trample on the pieces of paper.
''I was shocked,'' recalled Mr. Kawabata, 61, who was hospitalized for two weeks from the stress of the interrogation. ''Man, I thought, how far will the police go?''
Mr. Kawabata, who was never indicted, recently won a $5,000 judgment for mental anguish. Trampling the pieces of paper, it turned out, had its roots in a local feudal practice of ferreting out suspected Christians by forcing them to stomp on a cross.
The police then moved on to more potent alcohol. According to the trial's verdict and interviews with 17 people interrogated by the authorities, the police concocted a description of events according to which the assemblyman spent $17,000 to buy votes with shochu, a popular distilled spirit, and gifts of cash.
One of the first to confess was Ichiko Fujimoto, 53, a former employee of the assemblyman. After a couple of days of interrogation she broke down and admitted not only to distributing shochu and cash to her neighbors, but also to giving four parties at her home to gather support for the assemblyman.
''It's because they kept saying, 'Confess, just confess,' '' Ms. Fujimoto said in an interview at her home. ''They wouldn't listen to anything I said.''
Everything in her confession was made up, a court concluded. But it was enough for the police to start extracting confessions from others for supposedly receiving shochu and money at the parties. One neighbor, Toshihiro Futokoro, 58, began despairing on the third day of interrogation, even though he had yet to be formally arrested and was allowed to go home after each day's questioning.
''They kept saying that everybody's confessing, that there was nothing that I could do, no matter how hard I tried,'' Mr. Futokoro said, adding, ''I thought that nothing I said would ever convince them.''
At the end of the third day, Mr. Futokoro tried to kill himself by jumping into a river but was pulled out by a man out fishing. He then confessed.
Another man, Kunio Yamashita, 76, succumbed after a week of interrogation. The police told him that he was the lone holdout and that he could go home if he confessed. ''I hadn't done anything, but I confessed, and I told them I'd admit to whatever they said,'' said Mr. Yamashita, who eventually spent three months in jail.
A woman, Eiko Hamano, 65, confessed after the police threatened to arrest her unless she cooperated. ''They said that my grandson would be bullied at school, that my child would be fired from his company, that my whole family would suffer forever,'' she recalled.
On the fourth day, feeling so sick that she could barely walk, Ms. Hamano confessed to accepting money. To prove that she had spent the money, the police told her to find a receipt for an $85 purchase, she said.
But when she presented the police an $85 receipt for adult diapers she had bought for her mother, they told her she was now confessing to having received $170 instead and needed a receipt for that amount. Luckily, she had just bought a sink for that amount.
''Now I can laugh about it,'' said Ms. Hamano, who refused an order by the police to shout a confession out of a window. ''But it was serious back then.''
Others never confessed, including the assemblyman, Mr. Nakayama, 61, who spent 395 days in jail, and his wife, Shigeko, 58, who spent 273 days.
The village postmaster, Tomeko Nagayama, 77, spent 186 days behind bars. She was held alone in a windowless cell that she was forced to clean every night after enduring a full day of interrogation.
The police said her refusal to confess was harming her family, she said. Her husband was sick and could not live alone; her daughter had to quit her job to take over the duties at the post office.
But Ms. Nagayama, a former schoolteacher, never once considered confessing.
''I felt I'd rather die,'' she said. ''This kind of thing just shouldn't be tolerated in this world.''
Dr. Lao, what you giving above is
a report that has been whitewashed
beyond any reality. Even in ancient
Japan, things aren't that bad.
Just because they do thing
differently from the west, does
not meant it is all bad -- btw,
since you are a fan of buddha
teaching, what did buddha said
about "evidence" in the justice
system?
Thus, regretfully, Dr Lao, that
type of report has no credibility
with me whatsoever, and I am
confident that there are more to
the story above than it is being
told. In other words, I don't like
extreme brief and incomplete
stories. VOA did that alot, and
it bugged me quite a bit. I never
took any of their story seriously
no more.
Anyhow, what is your point with
all this? Are you saying that
Japan, with bad taste of justice,
help covering up corruption in
Cambodia? Help me out, will ya?
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