The White Peril 白禍

Surprise! It's Abe.

I mean, the next president of the LDP and therefore Prime Minister of Japan will be Shinzo Abe. He got 66% of the vote. Of course, that's internal. The public has been ambivalent, despite Abe's Clinton-ish way of addressing himself to the average middle-class citizen and even as reports hammered away at the near-inevitability of an Abe win.

It now remains to be seen how his "beautiful country" plan will take shape. He's promised to deepen ties with the US while repairing relations with the PRC and the Koreas. Sounds good, but it's hard to tell what concrete approach he plans to take. He's been one of the highest-profile members of the Koizumi administration to make pilgrimages to the Yasukuni Shrine, which is hardly a way to endear oneself to the rest of East Asia. He's also in favor of amending the constitution, and there's little doubt he's referring to Article 9 (which contains the non-aggression clause). How far does he want to go in restoring military capability to Japan? No one's sure.

Economically, the guy's a wild card, too. Koizumi was an economic liberal from the get-go; he brought in Heizo Takenaka and, as much as possible, gave him carte blanche when it came to banking and finance reform. The bills for privatization of Japan Post ended up going through a predictable defanging process on the way to ratification, but Koizumi was willing to draw a line in the sand over them. Abe wants to control deflation, doesn't think the Allied military tribunal that sentenced Japanese war criminals (yeah, I'm begging the question there...you know what I mean) was just, and doesn't seem to want schoolchildren learning about comfort women during World War II.

Since it's not clear what his prime policy directives are, it's not clear what his deal-breakers are. He's obviously pretty nationalist by personal conviction, but he lacks the long-standing network of powerful connections to make it likely that he'll be able to push through controversial pet proposals. He doesn't seem to have the force of personality to convince people to put aside their doubts, but he will need allies--the LDP is not in the most secure position itself. We should begin to see pretty rapidly what will be the driving force behind his policies when his beliefs hit reality. You can bet that the rest of East Asia, in addition to the Japanese public, will be watching.

Since the Aneha scandal broke last year, federal officials have manifested a charming capacity for surprise. The latest shock:

The infrastructure ministry, stunned to learn that builders rarely bother to scrutinize architectural blueprints, will require that they do so for all new wooden homes to make sure the structures are quake-proof, officials said.

They said builders must study the design plans before construction starts after learning that such procedures are rarely observed these days.

The ministry was so shocked at the finding that it decided to rescind an exemption put in place 22 years ago to allow builders to skip such checks.

The move comes on the heels of recent disclosures about a Tokyo company that built and sold nearly 700 wooden homes with substandard earthquake resistance, officials said.

...

Even more surprising was a finding by a cooperative association for quake-proof strength on wooden buildings, whose members are mostly medium- and small-sized builders.

It said that 62 percent of about 24,000 wooden homes it surveyed were not strong enough to withstand an earthquake even though they were put up in or after 1981, when quake-proof standards were tightened.

Is it really that surprising that construction companies would skip a step they'd been expressly exempted from having to execute? After all, the Aneha scandal demonstrated that not even civil servants whose explicit responsibility was to verify structural calculations roused themselves to do so.

The wooden building problem is a big deal, of course. Despite the folksy belief that wood-framed buildings are less likely to collapse in earthquakes because their flexible joints and organic materials allow them to flop around in harmony with Gaia until she settles down--seriously, you hear that from people here all the time--the fact is that wooden buildings have to be very well engineered to be safe. And when they do collapse, they're more likely to tip over than are buildings of rebarred concrete, which makes them more dangerous for the neighbors.