The White Peril 白禍

Okay, Jun'ichiro Koizumi isn't technically a lame duck because he's leaving his post as head of state by choice, but anyway....

The news outlets here, naturally, have been keeping close watch on how things are developing within the LDP, given that Prime Minister Koizumi plans to step down in September. Most of the updates are pretty boring, so I haven't been commenting on them. The Yomiuri has a nice summary of things to date up today, though:

Even members of the Mori faction, headed by former Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori, which has managed to maintain a semblance of unity, are having difficulty reaching a consensus on fielding one candidate in the election, indicating that the influence of the faction on their membership is declining.

At a press conference Friday, LDP General Council Chairman Fumio Kyuma said it was no longer in agreement with the recent trend for factions to choose candidates or take members' opinions into consideration to field a single candidate, referring to the failure of the Mori faction, the largest in the party, to reach an agreement on fielding a single candidate.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe and former Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuo Fukuda of the Mori faction are seen as increasingly likely to run in the LDP presidential election, which could signal a split of the faction. But the Mori faction may not be the only faction that will have two candidates competing for the top LDP post.

Oddly, the article doesn't mention that Koizumi himself was once a member of the Mori faction; his relationship with his former mentor has been strained at times. (Mori ticked the Prime Minister off by commenting against the perceived rashness of his threat to dissolve the lower house last year over Japan Post privatization.) Koizumi has been signaling that he wants factional string-pulling to be kept to a minimum in the selection of the next party leader:

"It's no longer easy to unify (a factional candidate). The old LDP is gone," Koizumi told reporters Tuesday night. "There is no way to stop them if they wish to run."

The comment was widely viewed as a move to keep former Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori in check as Mori was moving to select a candidate who will have the unanimous support of his faction.

Both Abe and Fukuda are members of the Mori faction, to which Koizumi once belonged.

...

Mori had apparently wanted to avoid rivalry between Abe and Fukuda as it could split his faction, and thus chip away his clout.

Whatever you may think of Koizumi's policies, the man has charisma; few other politicians gunning for the LDP presidency and prime ministership do (though I've always liked Fukuda and was disappointed two years ago when scandal forced him to resign as Chief Cabinet Secretary). Many of Koizumi's brash promises of reform have been abandoned for the sake of political maneuvering, and those that have gone through have usually been watered down. There's a lot of political time between now and September, and whether Koizumi's approach will live on after him remains to be seen.

A well-intended proposal was introduced by some concerned citizens yesterday:

The annual number of persons who commit suicide having topped 30000 for seven years running, some non-profit organizations and families of suicides began on 13 May to collect signatures on a petition seeking the institution of a society-wide suicide prevention law, provisionally called "The Fundamental Measure Against Suicide." Signatures were collected in seven places nationwide: Akita, Tokyo, Kanagawa, Kyoto, Osaka, Fukuoka, and Saga.

The plan is to collect 30000 signatures, to match the annual number of suicides, and to submit the proposal to both houses of the Diet next month. Supporters plan to work on Diet members of both ruling and opposition parties to get the fundamental law enacted through the legislative process.

Tokyo wants to decrease the number of suicides by at least 5000 annually by 2015, and the proposed law would make suicide prevention a federal responsibility.

Given the Dr. Phil-ization of American culture, this may be hard for some of my compatriots to register, but psychotherapy is seriously underdeveloped in Japan. There are any number of reasons for that. Japanese people learn from a young age to brazen their way through sadness and depression without letting them show. Let alone talking about them directly. Let alone talking about them directly with someone who's not a family member or teacher. Of course, people will admit to feeling kind of blue or being in a bad mood every now and then, but people aren't taught to identify signs of serious trouble in either themselves or others.

Could some kind of federal initiative help with that? Possibly on that last point, in the sense of providing education and maybe more trained counselors in known pressure cookers such as schools. (I don't know that simply bringing more attention to the issue would help much; Japanese citizens are already plenty aware that they have a high rate of suicide, not all of which can be attributed to noble attempts to save the family or company honor after some massive screw-up happens.) For people to feel okay about seeking help, acculturation probably needs to change at the household and neighborhood level, and those sorts of shifts don't play to the federal government's strengths.

This article in the English Asahi is promisingly headlined "Ministry gets tough on transport safety." Unfortunately, the truth appears to a little less cheering:

Currently, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport issues suspensions only if transport companies accumulate a certain number of penalty points for employee traffic violations.

Not only does it take a large number of violations to draw a suspension, the ministry's shortage of inspectors means that many are not counted.

In most cases, suspensions are imposed only after serious violations, such as fatal traffic accidents, the sources said.

I added emphasis to that one clause above because it conveys one of the problems that lead to lax safety enforcement in other sectors (the nuclear power industry springs to mind) also: lots and lots of bureaucrats, very few inspectors out in the field. The Asahi reporter doesn't do much with it, instead shifting to a discussion of how more market competition after deregulation of transportation industries has encouraged companies to overwork and underprepare their vehicle operators.

Did deregulation contribute to the increase in the number of accidents? That's certainly plausible. It's hard to judge from the statistics provided by the Asahi, though. Restrictions on entrants to the trucking industry were relaxed in 1990; to bus and taxi in 2002. The increase in the numbers of accidents caused by different types of vehicles was measured over the period from 1995 to 2005. What correlates with what is difficult to divine.

But in any case, one of the main points of having a government at all is to protect citizens--from external enemies and, sadly, from compatriots who want to harm or exploit them. If existing safety regulations are being enforced slackly or arbitrarily, there are systemic problems that instituting tighter regulations probably won't address. On the other hand, the government may be more willing now to take a firm line in enforcing safety standards precisely because the increase in the number of competitors means it's not just dealing with established giants that have long-standing connections to a lot of federal agencies. Cozy relationships tend to facilitate cover-ups.