Support for the ruling administration here has plunged to 32 percent according to a monthly opinion poll released this week, with respondents citing political funding scandals among the reasons for their discontent.

While all the main dailies released results this week showing a decline in support for the Democratic Party of Japan-led government of Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, it was a poll in the relatively progressive Asahi Shimbun that gave his administration the lowest approval rating, mirroring those of unpopular cabinets in the recent past led by Shinzo Abe and Yasuo Fukuda at the six-month stage.

Coverage of cabinet support polls can be somewhat relentless in this country, but the figure on this occasion is significant in that it marks an assessment of the government six months after its inauguration. The vertiginous decline from September’s support figure of 71 percent in a poll by the same newspaper clearly shows that the public is feeling disappointed by the new government. Indeed, the figure is perilously close to what the media here sees as the critical rating of 30 percent, below which an administration’s long-term future starts to be called into question.

Inconsistent policy statements by cabinet ministers, including the prime minister, coupled with the dithering over the relocation of the Futenma US air base in Okinawa have removed the initial shine from the administration’s reputation. But it is illicit financing that is tarnishing it.

Money scandals have already claimed one victim this week, with lower house DPJ member Chiyomi Kobayashi resigning after allegations of an illicit 16 million yen donation from a teacher’s union for her election campaign last year. But the main funding scandals involve Hatoyama himself and DPJ kingpin Ichiro Ozawa, giving the impression that while a new party has taken power, the same old connections between cash and politics exist.

With Hatoyama, it’s more a case of privilege and projected naivety than the more typical combination of backhanders-for-public works contracts—he hadn’t been paying tax on the billion-plus yen his incredibly wealthy mum has bankrolled his political career with.

The stink around Ozawa involves a dubious 400 million yen property purchase that was not registered by his funding organization, possibly because this would involve declaring where the money came from. In the latest poll, 74 percent said Ozawa should resign over the scandal, but Ozawa—the man the conservative Yomiuri Shimbun describes in heavy-handed terms as having dictatorial control over the DPJ—is standing his ground.

Were it not for the LDP’s hapless performance as an opposition party—incredibly, its own support also fell in the poll—the DPJ would surely have pressed some kind of panic button by now. But at the very least, the alarm bells must now be ringing loud and clear for all in the party to hear.

Should the DPJ slide below 30 percent in next month’s polls, surely the party will have to take rot-stopping action, signaling the end of the line for Ozawa.

Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama’s younger brother is again crying out for attention here in Japan. He announced yesterday his intention to form a new political force and to bolt from the main opposition party. But in making his melodramatic statement of intent, Kunio Hatoyama may have actually jumped the gun, to the embarrassment of his intended comrades.

Hatoyama’s move comes close on the heels of internal ultimatums for a major rethink by the conservative Liberal Democratic Party, which after decades of power now seems at a loss as to how to regain support--even as the ruling Democratic Party of Japan is shedding support over various financing scandals. Former Health and Welfare Minister Yoichi Masuzoe and former Finance Minister Kaoru Yosano have already played their cards to the point of brinkmanship, demanding that the LDP leadership gets it act together or face a break up of the party triggered by their respective departures.

Hatoyama has reportedly been in discussions with Yosano and Masuzoe and mentioned them both by name in a move that might have left them feeling red in the face. Theatrically referring to himself as a modern day Ryoma Sakamoto--the man who helped forge a disparate but ultimately victorious alliance of forces against Japan’s feudal shogunate in the 19th century--Hatoyama said at a news conference Monday that he wanted to be the ‘glue’ that held an alliance together, with Yosano and Masuzoe taking the leading roles.

If that was his true intention, it seems a peculiar way to go about it. Surely, he would have first coordinated opinions among the three so that they could all leave the LDP together to form a new political party if he really wanted to play a subsidiary role? Instead, it seems he’s gambled on creating a party of his own, in which he calls the shots, to which he can then attract Yosano, Masuzoe and others before this summer’s upper house election.

This is not the first ambitious move by Hatoyama--in 1999 he stood for Tokyo governor as an independent. Nor will it will not be his first gamble--his insistence on the stepping down of Yoshifumi Nishikawa as head of Japan Post Holdings last year did indeed lead to a resignation--his own as internal affairs minister. Nor even will it be the first time he has jumped ship. In fact, it’s the second time he’s deserted the LDP, that’s before we even get to the various other parties he’s left over the years, including the earlier version of the DPJ he launched with brother Yukio in 1996 (he left that party after concluding his less ambitious and more boffin-like brother was too much of a lefty).

But it’s the older brother who’s now prime minister, while the younger brother waits for allies to join him such as former LDP trade minister and postal rebel independent Takeo Hiranuma.

Will Yosano and Masuzoe follow Hatoyama’s lead? Today each was keeping his counsel while Hatoyama started to soft-pedal.

According to major daily the Asahi Shimbun, Hatoyama refined his tone this morning, saying: ‘Whether this ends up as the act of a single man, or if a potent opposition party can grow from this, all depends on what happens from this point on.’

The Democratic Party of Japan-led government here is no doubt pleased with itself this week after clearing up half a century of official ‘dishonesty’ over security issues while it also strengthened the nature of Japanese democracy to boot.

A panel of experts set up by Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada released its findings Tuesday relating to four alleged secret pacts with Japan’s main ally, the United States, including one allowing port calls by US ships carrying nuclear weapons without prior consultation. The panel concluded that three of the pacts did exist in a broad sense, while the fourth agreement was not of the same nature.

The finding marks a significant step toward increasing the transparency of Japanese government while making bureaucrats and politicians more aware of their obligation to explain their decision-making and not to simply cover up facts that are inconvenient. In short, it strengthens the idea that in a meaningful democracy, the public has a right to know.

Back in the tense climate of the Cold War, in the early 1960s, it is easier to understand why Japanese politicians were willing to turn a blind eye to the possibility of US ships entering Japanese ports with nuclear weapons, even though Japan and the United States had officially agreed that consultation over the entry of nuclear weapons through Japan had to take place beforehand. Japan felt it needed the security offered by the United States and was keen not to ruffle any feathers in Washington over the two countries’ respective interpretations of how bringing nuclear weapons into Japan was defined.

As the only nation in the world to have been subjected to the horror of atomic bombing, Japan was--and is--naturally very sensitive about all matters nuclear. So the government thought it better the public should not know at that time. Or ever it would seem.

The damning part of the story lies in the decades of self-contented insistence on the sanctity of Japan’s three non-nuclear principles by a succession of Liberal Democratic Party governments, even though those very principles were announced after the secret pact was already in place. Then Prime Minister Eisaku Sato even won the Nobel Peace Prize for stating in 1967 that Japan would not possess, make or allow the entry of nuclear weapons.

So without actually saying as much, the DPJ has again provided a further humiliation for the LDP. The timing is also good for the DPJ, which has been dithering over the relocation of the US Marine Corps’ Futenma air station on the southern island of Okinawa, despite a previous deal on the issue with the United States. The revelations this week portray Japan under the LDP as having been very much the junior party in the bilateral alliance--the government apparently having had to swallow an interpretation of the port call consultations that was convenient for the US, and carry out the grubby deception this reality implied. All the more reason, then, for today’s DPJ-led government to take time in deciding what to do with the Futenma base.

As might be hoped, all the main dailies in Japan welcomed the findings. The conservative Yomiuri Shimbun said in its editorial on Wednesday that in the interests of security, it was now time to drop the third non-nuclear principle rather than reaffirm it, as the DPJ has done. The seemingly progressive Asahi Shimbun was more wholehearted in its praise of the government panel’s findings, but insisted that Japan should forge ahead with efforts to downgrade reliance on nuclear weapons for security rather than to accept a two-and-a-half non-nuclear stance (as essentially proposed by the Yomiuri).

But if the DPJ deserves praise for grabbing this political nettle and dealing with it, some credit is also due to Japan’s other main daily, the Mainichi Shimbun. It was a Mainichi reporter who first shed light on one of the secret pacts involving payments related to the reversion of Okinawa back to Japan in 1972. Takichi Nishiyama apparently came across telegrams referring to the deal in 1971, but instead of this resulting in the government addressing the issue, Nishiyama was prosecuted for his involvement in leaking government documents.

In its editorial on Wednesday, the Mainichi also reminded readers that the paper had interviewed former US Ambassador Edwin Reischauer in 1981 and he had confirmed the non-consultation interpretation for port calls—an interpretation he himself had conveyed to Japanese Foreign Minister Masayoshi Ohira in 1963. You can guess how the LDP government at that time responded to the comments in the interview. As in keeping with decades of hypocrisy, it chose, in the words of the Mainichi, to continue ‘the lie.’

Yukihisa Fujita, the director-general of the international department of Japan’s governing party, was forced to comment yesterday on the blistering attack launched at him by the Washington Post in its editorial Monday.

In the editorial, the Post lambasted Fujita for casting doubt on whether 9/11 was a terrorist attack. Characterizing Fujita as a ‘Brahmin in the foreign policy establishment’ of Japan’s government, the editorial went on to describe Fujita as a man ‘susceptible to the imaginings of the lunatic fringe,’ claiming that he also referred to stock market profiteering by those who had advance knowledge of 9/11 and that he said some of the plane hijackers were still alive.

The timing could not be worse given that Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama’s government continues to dither over how to resolve the relocation of the US Marine Corps’ Futenma air station on the southern island of Okinawa, despite a signed and sealed bilateral agreement with the nation’s biggest ally on the issue. Tokyo’s show of not allowing itself to be pushed around by the United States has certainly been testing the patience of the Obama administration, and, it would seem, sections of the US media.

As might be expected, Fujita yesterday said he had been misrepresented. He told one of the major business dailies here, the Sankei Shimbun, that the interview had nothing to do with 9/11, that the comments he did make hadn’t been given in an official capacity and that the paper had even described him with the wrong title. Similarly, he told the Asahi Shimbun that the remarks were personal comments made during informal talk after the interview.

It’s certainly startling that a member of the Democratic Party of Japan with a foreign policy role should make such comments about 9/11, and the Post has every right to challenge him on this.

But is there anything new here? Fujita hasn’t just cast doubt on the US account of 9/11 in post-interview chitchat—he’s questioned it formally in Japan’s parliament. No mention was made in the Post about what the actual interview with Fujita was about, nor was a separate story about the interview available on the Post’s Web site. So was Fujita set up so the Post could get him to talk about 9/11 and then use his comments for an editorial slamming anti-Americanism in Japan’s government?

At this stage, you could make a strong case for saying yes.

The idea of taking holiday when others are working is a moral minefield for many people in this nation of hardworking diligence. Be it the personal guilt of failing to show maximum commitment to an employer or the fear of reprisals for being seen as lazy, many Japanese choose not to take their full holiday entitlement. Knowing that employees will find it difficult to kick up a fuss, some companies happily take advantage of this situation.

Against this background, it’s not surprising to find that most Japanese take vacation when everyone else takes vacation—a handful of days at New Year and in the spring and summer holidays. While the nation can vacation with a clean conscience at these times, these mass holidays come with a price—expensive flights and hotels, and transportation gridlock.

To alleviate these intense periods of hellish congestion, a government panel aired plans earlier this month to introduce two five-day holidays in the spring and the autumn. This would increase the acceptable holiday periods in the year from three to four, cementing the status of autumn’s so-called Silver Week. So far, so good.

It turns out, though, that the five-day holidays are really only three-day holidays with a weekend tacked on. But the real problem lies in the final key aspect of the plan, namely to stagger the holidays over different calendar weeks according to five geographical zones. This would effectively smudge these holiday periods over a period of up to five weeks, in an effort to spread the touristic benefits to provincial areas and relieve congestion.

Confused yet? Well, just imagine how confusing it’s going to be trying to operate a nationwide company knowing that for up to 10 weeks a year, part of your business will be closed. The result, of course, will be that a skeleton staff is left operating companies in areas ‘on vacation’ and soon the need to be on the skeleton staff will take everyone back to where we started.

Creating an environment in which companies learn to schedule around their employees’ vacations is the real solution. Establishing four holiday periods in the year would certainly be an improvement over the current situation, but the idea of staggering so many days? Surely that’s doomed to fail.

A wave of enthusiasm for the microblogging site Twitter among politicians in Japan caused red faces this week. In this country of rigorous timekeeping it was bad enough that three Cabinet ministers turned up 15 minutes late for a parliamentary committee meeting. But the blushes deepened when it turned out that one of them had been sending a tweet two minutes after the scheduled start of the meeting.

According to the Asahi Shimbun, Kazuhiro Haraguchi, the internal affairs minister, arrived at the room to jeers for his tardiness and for his tweeting.

So how did anyone know about his miniblogging? Because, of course, they were tweeting too. In fact, Hiroshige Seko of the opposition Liberal Democratic Party had already sent out three tweets by the time the ministers arrived.

This probably isn't quite what Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama had in mind when he started tweeting himself on New Year’s Day and encouraged others to get closer to the people via the cyber warbling site…

Former Health, Labor and Welfare Minister Yoichi Masuzoe has been ratcheting up the pressure on embattled opposition party leader Sadakazu Tanigaki this week.

In a speech on Monday he reportedly hinted that Tanigaki should step down, citing the flagging popularity of the conservative Liberal Democratic Party. Without reform of the party, Masuzoe said he wouldn’t be able to support it, indicating that the other option would be to break up the party.

These comments led to verbal warning from upper house LDP Secretary General Shuzen Tanigawa on Wednesday. The same day, Shigeru Ishiba, chairman of the party’s policy research council, insisted that it was ‘not the time’ to change the LDP president, according to the Japan Times.

Masuzoe is one of the few LDP politicians who enjoys popular pulling power, so he would be a strong candidate for leading the party. But he also has good relations with Yoshimi Watanabe, who broke away from the LDP in January 2009 to form his own party (Your Party), suggesting a destination or ally should Masuzoe bolt from the LDP.

Within the LDP, Masuzoe set up an economics study group last month with an agenda of economic liberalism reminiscent of former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi--a move likely to attract younger members of the party. What will be his next move? Everything looks set for a make-or-break political drama.

One of the major dailies, the Asahi Shimbun, however, questioned Masuzoe’s commitment to toppling Tanigaki, citing in today’s edition his reputation for words but not action, and his decision not to fight it out for the LDP presidency after the party’s crushing defeat in last summer’s general election, dashing the hopes of many younger party members.

Masuzoe would have certainly been one of the favorites to take the helm of the party at that time. However, it struck me that by not standing, he was playing a waiting game. Let the post-election leader take the brunt of the bad times, then take over to save the day and the party after a poor showing in this summer’s upper house elections. Alternatively, watch the party implode and set up shop elsewhere.

The present machinations, though, suggest Masuzoe might make a move sooner rather than later.

A concept that often emerges when analyzing the apparent enigma of Japan is 'nihonjinron'. Essentially, it’s the idea that there’s something special about the Japanese and their ‘homogenous’ nation.

The fact that books that depict the Japanese in such a way have a domestic market indicates that a certain segment of the population is interested in this topic. Perhaps some of these Japanese readers find it a source of comfort or reassurance to feel that they are, after all, ‘different’ from other peoples of the world. For many Western writers, though, nihonjinron is seen as a kind of misleading nationalistic drum for pushing the right's agenda.

Writing in The Asia Pacific Journal, Chris Burgess picks up this theme. It’s a lengthy piece with an academic tone, but it does make some interesting points. Burgess wants to move away from the idea of nihonjinron in binary terms as either total myth or reality. As common sense would suggest, the truth is somewhere between.

'What is striking in all of this, is the (often patronising) way popular representations tend to be dismissed as "false", "inaccurate", or "illusory", even while acknowledging that they constitute a widespread assumption that many Japanese believe form a key part of the experience of being Japanese…the nation that is Japan--or any other nation for that matter--is a discourse, an imaginative construct held together by "myth" and "tradition".'

While all nations may have some kind of less-than-historically-accurate national ‘discourse’ on what it is to be part of that nation, there’s certainly more of a market among Japanese for books on the special nature of being Japanese, than there is, say, among Brits for the special nature of being British.

But an element I’d like to see explored a little in this kind of analysis is the role played by the Japanese language itself. When a speaker of Japanese is constantly having to make a decision on the status of the other person in a conversation, and constantly having to define and redefine the groups to which they do or do not belong, is it any wonder that speakers of that language might have a stronger tendency to define themselves as a group at the national level?

Just when it seemed the Liberal Democratic Party had won back some momentum with the gubernatorial victory in Nagasaki a week ago, the party managed to shoot itself in the foot with an ill-advised boycotting of parliamentary sessions.

The LDP, dumped from power after decades of almost exclusive control, has struggled to find anything in the way of policy to take on the Democratic Party of Japan, and has instead been focusing its efforts on political funding scandals involving the two pillars of the DPJ, Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama and General Secretary Ichiro Ozawa.

The 'politics and money' theme, which gives the public the impression of one apparently corrupt party replacing another, has hit the popularity rating of Hatoyama’s Cabinet, plunging it to 37 percent, according to an Asahi Shimbun poll last week. Together with the local election result in Nagasaki, it seemed that momentum had started swinging the LDP’s way under the stewardship of Sadakazu Tanigaki.

However, the LDP leader seemed to get carried away with the moment, and, saying it was ‘now or never,’ called the boycott for as long as Ozawa was not summoned to give testimony to the Diet over the scandal involving his funding management organization. But Tanigaki failed to confirm before making his bold jump that everyone else was willing to jump, too. He found that not only did sections of his own party have problems with the idea, but that the other opposition parties were also balking at the prospect of being seen to ignore debate over the national budget at a time of economic crisis.

By Thursday, the boycott was off, and a humiliated Tanigaki was trying unconvincingly to spin the matter in his favor, describing the boycott as 'just a test.'

Writing in today’s Mainichi Shimbun, one of Japan’s biggest dailies, Takao Yamada lambasted Tanigaki’s three-day boycott, and described the LDP’s initial swaggering as 'childish.' He said it made him recall an absurd episode from 27 years ago when an opposition leader dressed up in a traditional top-knotted wig to play a prank on LDP kingpin Kakuei Tanaka.

Before calling a boycott, Tanigaki needed to confirm the opposition was united behind it and that popular sentiment would see it as making sense, Yamada wrote. The LDP leader, he said, had failed in what was really an attempt to show his party he was not 'soft.'

If Yamada is right, and the boycott was indeed an attempt by Tanigaki to assert his leadership skills, he’s certainly got some work to do.

The decision yesterday by the US Senate panel looking into the Toyota recalls not to call as a witness Akio Toyoda, suggests that the company president’s appearance at the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform the previous day might have been just enough to turn the tide in this public relations disaster.

It seems incredible that only 10 days ago, Toyoda was suggesting he had no plans of his own to appear in front of the House committee hearing, failing to see it as a golden opportunity to show remorse and to explain what measures would be taken to rebuild confidence in the brand. His PR advisers should have all been sacked if they hadn’t managed to change his mind.

As expected, he was grilled--for three and half hours. But by this point in the debacle, the benefits of having the head of the company try to explain himself in person far outweighed the risks of an errant response.

As detailed in a statement released beforehand, Toyoda said the company’s growth over recent years had ‘too quick,’ a theme he has repeated time and again since taking over the helm of the company last year. Prioritizing sales, he said, had jumbled the company’s traditional concept of safety first, then quality, then volume. He apologized for the accidents that had taken place and specifically to the Saylor family whose tragic accident fuelled momentum toward the recalls. Then he explained what measures would be taken.

Less reassuring was his suggestion that he didn’t find out about the sticky accelerator pedals until the end of last year, as well as his insistence that the electronic throttle system was fine. How could the head of the company not know about an accelerator problem the whole world seemed to have heard about last year, and which his own company had already been addressing in Europe?

As for the electronic throttle system, after seeing last year’s stance of ‘it’s not the pedal, it’s the mat’ fall by the wayside, surely he has to allow for the possibility of yet-to-be understood problems here, too? Toyoda said a third party consultancy group would look into the system. If he hadn’t said that, the positive impact of everything else would have been undermined.

Shrewdly, Toyoda also had ‘a cordial and open discussion’ about improving safety with US Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, teared up while talking to Toyota plant workers and dealers in Washington, and appeared on Larry King Live. Like his committee appearance, his performance on King’s show was workmanlike rather than charismatic, and most of the same points were made. But it showed good intent and he scored points when he refused to take King’s bait that there was an element of ‘Japan bashing’ taking place. He certainly got grilled again, but that’s probably what watching Toyota drivers wanted to see.

Here in Japan, one of the big dailies, the Asahi Shimbun, pointed out in its editorial today that despite the trip to the United States, the real work was yet to be done, namely: getting to the bottom of what delayed the recall, what caused the accelerator problems and opening up the company’s management to the outside--including its customers.

All the same, citing favourable comments by House panel chair, Edolphus Towns, and coverage by the New York Times and the Washington Post, the paper concluded on the front page of the same edition that amid unprecedented media interest in the hearing, Toyoda had cleared an important hurdle toward regaining confidence in Toyota.

The later news that Congress had heard enough from him, surely confirms that his trip has indeed been a relative success.