 Japanese politics is also a very important context in which all of this takes place. And there's nobody better than Professor Jerry Curtis, who is the Burgess Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Columbia University and the former director of Columbia's Weatherhead East Asia Institute and a distinguished research fellow at the Tokyo Foundation to address us today. He has spent more than 47 years, both in that role at Columbia University and visiting and living in Japan and really getting into the thick of Japanese politics to the point where he is second to none in his understanding of Japanese politics as a foreigner. And it's a delight to be able to welcome him here today. When I was ambassador in Japan, it was a great opportunity always to speak to Jerry when I had the opportunity and he had the time. And he was a great counsel of benefit to me. And I'm sure he will be to everybody here today. So I welcome him here to speak and ask you to come to the stage. Thank you very much. Well, good morning, everyone. I'm truly delighted to be able to be here today and be part of this Japan Update Day. I'm looking forward to the panel discussions after I get finished here and to learning from others about your perspectives on Japan. And I already have learned a lot just by listening to Jason right now. I want to thank Ambassador McLean for his very generous introduction. We met last night for the first time since he had been ambassador in Japan and I'm delighted to see him again. Also, I'm delighted to see the Japanese ambassador here in Australia who's with us this morning and Mrs. Kusaka because we know each other from their previous position which was as the ambassador and counsel general in New York City. So I had to come all the way down to Cambridge to catch up with Kusaka-san but I'm delighted to have the chance to do so. So these panels this afternoon are going to go over the politics, foreign policy, womenomics and other issues. So I think maybe I thought that what I might usefully contribute this morning would be to provide some background and perspective by focusing my comments on the structural changes that have been ongoing in the Japanese political system and in the international political system and how they're changing the policy process and changing policy itself. Now some of you who know me are aware that I've been involved in the study of Japanese politics for a very long time. I first lived in Tokyo in 1964, the year of the Tokyo Olympics. And I'm still studying Japanese politics as the next Tokyo Olympics approaches, 56 years after the last one. So the question some of you may have in mind is why? What is it that has been so interesting about Japan and its politics that has kept my attention for more than half a century as it has? Well, you know, at first sight it doesn't appear that very much about Japanese politics has changed over this time. The LDP was dominant, ruled alone for nearly 40 years after it was created in 1955. It suffered a hiccup in 1996 when it lost power for several months to a ragtag coalition under Prime Minister Hosokawa. That included every other party in the diet except for the communists. And then it suffered a more serious defeat in 2009 when the Democrats came to power, the DPJ, Democratic Party of Japan. They lasted in power for three years, during which time the DPJ's main accomplishment was to convince the public of its incompetence in running a government. So the LDP came back to power and it is now stronger and the opposition is weaker than ever before. The LDP has a large majority of lower house seats, two-thirds with its accommodating coalition partner, the Kometo. And as a result of the upper house election that was held this past July, now the ruling party of the LDP has a single party majority in that chamber too for the first time in 27 years. Two-thirds of the seats in the upper house are held by parties that favor constitutional revision. Prime Minister Abe will have been in office for six years when his term ends in 2018. It looks likely, very likely in my view, that the LDP will amend its party rules to allow him to run for a third term. And if he gets another term, he will have been in office longer than any Prime Minister in modern Japanese history, not just post-war. Beating out the three longest previous Prime Ministers to pre-war, Katsura-Taro, Itohirubumi, and then Satoesaku in the post-war period, all of them elected from the same prefecture, Yamaguchi Prefecture, in the major period of the area known as Choshu, as Prime Minister Abe himself. Right now, there's nobody in sight who looks as though he or she might become strong enough to defeat Abe should he decide to run. But a lot can happen in the next two years. If the economy worsens, if Renho, the new leader of the Democratic Party, surprises the skeptics and offers an appealing alternative, and if dissatisfaction with Abe grows strong within the LDP, well, then the situation may change quite dramatically. It's unlikely. But nowhere as unlikely as the idea that Donald Trump would become the Republican candidate for president and indeed might well become the next president of the United States. Something I'm actually going to come back to and talk about briefly at the end of this presentation, because you cannot give a talk about anything today without getting into this crazy situation that exists in American politics, which has a big impact, by the way, on the US-Japan relationship. As so, when we come to the opposition parties, as I just said, so the LDP, yeah, so what's changed? The LDP was the dominant power. Before it's the dominant power now. As for the opposition parties, they are what they always have been in post-war Japan, except for those two brief and unsuccessful experiences in government. They are parties whose function is to oppose, to reject LDP policy, especially in a knee-jerk fashion when it comes to national security policy. And to do so without any expectation that doing this is going to bring them to power. So since the LDP favors constitutional reinterpretation to permit collective defense, so the Democratic Party opposes it, even though many of its leaders actually support it. When he was Prime Minister, Mr. Noda Yosiko, the DPJ of Prime Minister, talked in the diet, raised in the diet the possibility of reinterpreting the Constitution to permit collective defense. And his government actually drafted the bill that eventually became the classified secrets law. But the head of the Democratic Party at the time of the upper house election this past July, Mr. Okada, he tried to turn the election into a referendum on Article 9, opposition to revision of Article 9. But Prime Minister Abe downplayed that issue. Focuses appeal and abinomics, claiming that Japan was halfway home, halfway towards the goal line. And asking the public to give the party the support he needed to make abinomics a success. And the Democrats don't have an economic strategy to offer in place of abinomics. So they could do little better than criticize Abe for not achieving his goal, which he had already conceded. So no wonder, support for the Democratic Party is in the single digits. And we'll see whether Renho is able to change that situation. Now the voters. So here too, at first glance, not much seems to have changed. The strong pacifist or isolationist sentiment in the public is not shared by the LDP leadership. And it never has been shared by the LDP leadership. But that has not stopped voters from giving the LDP diet majorities. This is a particular and a peculiar feature of Japanese politics. They did so when Kishinobosuke was prime minister in the late 1950s. And they do so now with his grandson, Abe Shinzo, holding that post. So the reasons why the LDP is able to win, even though there's considerable public criticism of some of its key policies, are much the same now as they were in the past. It wins by default. It wins because voters want stability. And they don't believe the opposition parties can govern effectively. Public opinion polls show. Majorities oppose constitutional revision. Majorities oppose collective defense of the classified secret legislation. And interestingly, the majority of Japanese voters, when you ask them, do not believe that they've benefited from avianomics. But the LDP wins because voters assume that things would not be better for the LDP to be replaced as the governing party. And probably they'd be worse, both in terms of the economy and its relations with the United States. So this is not a new story. But there's a new story. And it's an important story about how Japan's political democracy has evolved and is evolving. How the parties, the LDP, the Komeito, the Democrats, how their organization has changed and how the relationship between the ruling party and the government has changed. And those are the issues I want to spend a few minutes talking about before looking at some issues of foreign policy. So for those of you who are students of Japanese politics and read about the history of the LDP as being a coalition of factions, it's no longer a coalition of factions. Factions are not that important, not what they once were. And it doesn't any longer operate as something that I once referred to as the party's franchise system in which candidates essentially self-select, get factional backing, use that to obtain the party's endorsement and to amass a political bar chest and run a campaign built almost entirely on the candidate's personal organization and name recognition and appeal. Partly due to changes in the electoral system, but not only for that reason, the Prime Minister, President of the party was Prime Minister, and a few other key party leaders, they determine candidate endorsements. They control the funds that now go to support campaigns. So in any country, a candidate's personal appeal, his organizational muscle matter, but in Japan, they matter, but they are not anywhere as important as it used to be. It is a very big change. National diet election outcomes are much more influenced these days by the appeal of the party leader and by the public perceptions of the ruling party's competence in dealing with national and international issues than was true in the past. Now, during the sort of golden years of LDP rule, there were two main recruiting grounds for LDP diet candidates, local politicians, especially prefectural assemblymen, who moved up the ranks and ran for the diet, and retired high-ranking bureaucrats. Today, there's still a lot of bureaucrats going into politics in Japan, but they go in after just a few years in the bureaucracy, having made an early choice to have a political rather than a bureaucratic career. They may be policy wonks, but they don't have the experience or the personal connections inside the bureaucracy that made it possible for leaders like Ikeida or Ohira or Fukuda or Miyazawa who rose to the highest post in the bureaucracy to be effective political leaders. And as for local politicians, there are very few who graduate to the diet any longer. The term for the group of political professionals in the diet, Tōjinha, has almost completely disappeared from the Japanese political vocabulary, as have the politicians who used to make Japanese politics so colorful. There are many talented and terrific people in the diet, in the LDP, but there are too many diet politicians, in my view, who try too hard to prove to the public that they know more about policy than the bureaucrats do and do not put enough energy into doing what politicians need to do, work hard at constituency service and explain complex issues in terms most people can understand. This was particularly true of the DPJ, which came to power saying that from now on, politicians rather than bureaucrats are going to be making the decisions in Japanese seizu shō. Excluding bureaucrats rather than mobilizing their expertise, a major reason for the DPJ's failure to rule effectively. Japan, as I mentioned, changed the electoral system in 1993 from this multi-member district where multiple candidates were elected to essentially a single-member district with a proportional representation piece to it, but it's predominantly a single-member district system. In the Japanese social context, this has been very detrimental, in my view, to the quality of Japanese politics. It's played an important role in the disappearance of interesting and impressive politicians. Factions and the accompanying corruption were weakening under the old system. It wasn't necessary to have electoral change to bring it about. Public concern about national and not just constituency issues was increasing before the system was changed. The Japanese electorate has become more diverse and that made it much more difficult to run LDP, to run multiple candidates in many districts and win. So in my view and in the view of a lot of politicians at the time, and especially now, if that system had been kept in place, Japan probably would have evolved a moderately pluralistic party system. But the idea that all the evils of Japanese, all the problems in Japanese politics, or many of them could be resolved by adopting this new electoral system was picked up by the media and it overwhelmed the opposition and it was passed. And Japan will live with this electoral system for a long time to come because you cannot get fundamental electoral change very often. But I think what has happened is that as a result of this system change, Japan has got a system now that weakens the links between politicians and their constituents. Weakens grassroots democracy, concentrates too much power in the party executive. And rather than consolidating a two-party system, which was supposedly its goal, it may be creating a more uncontested one-party dominant system than was true before, which is a major point I guess I make in the article that is in this current issue of the East Asia Forum. This may be getting down into a little bit too much into the weeds for some of you, but I think that another important and overlooked factor in how a wide political organization on the local level has changed as much as it has in Japan has not been the electoral system, but the amalgamation of towns and villages. There was a major amalgamation in the Meiji period that reduced the number of municipalities from over 71,000 that existed in 1883 to a little more than 14,000, 71,000 to 14,000 by the turn of the century. And then after the Second World War, there was another amalgamation wave that brought the number of municipalities down to about 3,500 by 1960. But in the first decade of the 21st century, the government initiated even more ambitious amalgamation program, reduced the number of municipalities. And with that, the number of village, town, and city assemblies to 1,719, 53% fewer than had existed at the end of the 20th century. So the purpose of this amalgamation, this reduction in the number of municipalities was to reduce costs and make government more efficient. But political reform almost always has unintended consequences. And this one had an unintended consequence. It undermined the ability of the LDP's political machine, which is the sum total of the personal political machines of Islamic members to deliver the vote. So as the number, the point is this, as the number of municipalities has gotten smaller, the number of votes a local assembly needs to get elected has gotten larger, has increased. In my old book about election campaigning in Japan, Daishinotanjo in Japanese, I talk a lot about the key role local politicians played in gathering the vote for diet members. But local politicians no longer can rely as much on the face-to-face relationships they enjoyed with their supporters in very small, cohesive communities to obtain the votes they need to get elected and the votes that they can deliver to the diet candidate that they are supporting. And this was brought home to the LDP in 2009 when it lost the election to the DPJ. The machine doesn't deliver and it's caused the LDP to change in many ways the way it goes about trying to raise to get votes. And voters in Japan are much less susceptible to appeals that they vote out of a sense of obligation or an accord with community consensus that they were before. Whenever I talk about this, the memory that comes back to me goes back all those many years ago when I was doing the research for this book on election campaigning, I was in some rural mountain village with a local assemblyman and we're walking down the street in this village and a farmer approaches from the other direction. And this assemblyman I'm with says to him, you know there's an election for the diet coming soon and I'm supporting this candidate, name was Sato, I'm supporting Sato. I hope you will too. And the response was very striking. I said, of course, I am so indebted to you, of course I'll vote for Sato. This was Japan, not Japan today. You imagine the United States, I think here in Australia as well, and you walk down the street and some community in the States and a local politician meets a friend and says, I'm supporting Joe Smith and I wish you would too. He said, of course, I owe you so many favors, I'll vote for Mr. Smith. No, you don't, this was Japan. This is not Japan anymore. It's a big change. So the result is that the LDP machine still functions, but it's a very weak shadow of once it once was. Local politicians are no longer the central players in the LDP's election campaigns. In the old days, diet members provided what the Japanese referred to as a pipe, a pipe to the central government's coffers, but much less money flows through these pipelines now and voters demand for yet more bridges, more highways, more dams, has dramatically decreased. I think it was the first time that I had a conversation with Abe Shinzo, the current prime minister, was when he had been elected. I think only after his first term in office. I don't remember exactly why, but I called on him in his office and we chatted. And like a lot of politicians those days, they had read this book of mine, which never sold much in the United States, but it became quite well known in Japan. It's very important to get a good title when you publish a book. In English it was election campaigning Japanese style, excuse me while I yawn, but in Japanese, my editor had a great knack of picking a good title. Anyway, Abe said, you know, I read your book when I was younger and I was very interesting, but said even in my prefecture in Yamaguchi, you could not win election, win an election today, running the kind of campaign you described there, because my voters are not interested in yet another highway, yet another bridge, yet another pork barrel project. They want, they're interested in their social security benefits. They're interested in pollution control. They're interested in their children's future. It's a different agenda. And this was in the mid 1990s and it's become even more so today. Now, the LDP is not the only party to change. I want to talk a little bit about the Komeito because it's a very interesting story of social change in Japan, I think. The Komeito, which is the LDP's coalition partner, has gone through a quite dramatic transformation. From the late 1960s, for about a decade, I was the director of a US-Japan parliamentary exchange program. And I would regularly bring American congressman to Tokyo to meet their Japanese counterparts. The first conference we had in Tokyo was in 1969. And we arranged for the US delegation to have separate meetings with the leaders of each of the political parties, including the Komeito. But that party had only been formed five years earlier as the political arm of Sokogakai. And its support was concentrated among poor people who had migrated from the countryside to the cities. Many of them worked at unskilled jobs without job security. The party advocated policies that positioned it on the Japanese left, where it competed most especially with the communists. But to the American congressman and to me, it appeared to be much more a party of the right than of the left and disturbingly so. We met with the Komeito diet members at the Sokogakai headquarters in Shinanomachi. And it began without being taken to an auditorium to see a film about Sokogakai. And the movie looked as though it had been produced in North Korea. The same adulation for their leader, Ikeda Daisaku, as the North Koreans showered on Kim Il-sung. The same mass gatherings where people in the stands would lift colored cards in perfect synchronization to spell out the party's propaganda slogans. Several of the American participants left that movie and left the meeting shaken by the experience. This was the Komeito in 1970. But the Komeito has traveled a huge distance since then. Sokogakai eventually broke its ties with Nichiren Shoshu and gave up the practice of shakfuku. Shakfuku is kind of an intense brainwashing effort to get people to convert to Sokogakai. And over time, the Komeito moved to the center of the political spectrum. First on the center left and then after 1998 on the center right as the LDP's coalition partner. Seven decades after the end of the war, Sokogakai members are no longer impoverished and frightened migrants from rural Japan who came to Sokogakai through shakfuku. Sokogakai members today are for the most part people who grew up in Sokogakai households. Households that enjoy a degree of affluence that early generations of Sokogakai members cannot imagine. They are people born into the religion, not converted to it. So many of their parents, kind of the first generation Sokogakai members, many of their parents, like Japanese parents generally, knowing that the path to success is through the higher education system, push their children to get a good education. As a result, Sokogakai members now hold important positions in the government bureaucracy and in business and in other professions. The Komeito, in other words, has become the political arm of a religious organization with deep roots in the middle class. And it's that change in the social composition of the Gakkai membership that makes it possible to have alliance with the LDP. And it's why when American politicians now meet with Komeito leaders, those leaders never mentioned Sokogakai, almost never mentioned Sokogakai. And for certain, they don't bring them to Sokogakai headquarters in Shiranomachi anymore. It's a big and interesting change, at least in my view. Now, as for the leading opposition party, the Democrats, it's torn, torn between a pragmatic wing that favors it becoming a kind of second conservative party, more liberal than the LDP on economic and social issues, and supportive of a bipartisan foreign policy. And another wing that clings to a traditional pacifist position and is more to the left on domestic issues. There's a lot of skepticism in the Democratic Party and outside that Renho will be able to unify this party. But at least so far, so good. She reached out to the conservative wing of the party by getting former Prime Minister Noda, who I mentioned earlier, to agree to be the party's secretary general. Perhaps she'll surprise everyone. In any case, the LDP is not as popular as it might appear. Voting rates have gone down, they do well, but it's not as popular as it might appear so that even if the Democratic Party does not get strong enough to challenge its hold on power, it's quite possible that it can win enough seats to act as a break and to provoke leadership change in the LDP. But the point to be stressed is that the fundamental weakness of Japan's political democracy continues to be the failure of political forces opposed to the LDP to create a party that offers the voters a realistic alternative. The Democrats had their shot in 2009 and they blew it. They were unprepared, they lacked government experience. Instead of trying to mobilize bureaucracy and leveraging its expertise, they turned it into its enemy by excluding it from important policy-making decisions. So under current circumstances, the only way the opposition is going to succeed is if the LDP loses public confidence and splits. It's happened before, but there's no reason to believe it's gonna happen again anytime soon. So I've gone on some length here about these internal party changes to make a simple point. The LDP is in important respects a different party today from what it used to be. It employs a different strategy to obtain voter support. There's continuity to be sure, but the changes are more dramatic, not only in the LDP, but in the political system overall. So the kind of dynamic tension that used to characterize relations among LDP factions and between the LDP and the opposition, that's given way to a new kind of dominance by the LDP. And so incoherence in the policy goals and strategies of the opposition. There's also been a basic change in the relationship between the ruling party and the government. And this is a very crucial importance for the way policy is made. Political power today is concentrated in the prime minister's office to a degree that has never been true in Japanese history. The cabinet is no longer a group of equals, each minister in effect being the CEO of his ministry and the prime minister serving as a kind of chairman of the board. This is Abe Shinzo's cabinet. He demands loyalty, he gets it. He's kept people who he trusts and whom he needs to maintain control over the party in the cabinet in key positions for an unprecedentedly long time. The chief cabinet secretary, Mr. Suga, the finance minister, Mr. Aso, the foreign minister, Mr. Kishida, have been in those positions since Abe came into office this time. Mr. Shiozaki, the health and welfare minister from the first cabinet reshuffle. The party's role in policymaking has been sharply reduced as power has been come concentrated in the prime minister's office. Not only that, but the prime minister's office, the Kante in Japanese. The Kante controls high bureaucratic appointments in a more hands-on fashion than ever before. There was a reform in 2012 that created a new personnel of FAS bureau in the prime minister's office. It gives the chief cabinet secretary control ability to the power to vet around 600 top appointments. This creates really strong incentives for bureaucrats hoping for promotion not to question the prime minister's policy positions. It was prime minister Hashimoto in the late 1990s who initiated the administrative reforms that have created this Kante-centered political process. He reduced the number of ministries, created the council on economic and fiscal policy that enables prime ministers to set policy priorities and impose them on the bureaucracy. I didn't appreciate Hashimoto all that much when he was alive. He was a rather prickly, difficult personality. Hard to get to know, at least for me. But I think, I kind of owe this to him. I think historians will view him as one of the more important post-war Japanese prime ministers. And his reforms were further advanced by Koizumi who ended the practice of having the executive council of the LDP have to approve government legislation before submitting it to the diet. And he made the council on economic and fiscal policy a truly important institution. But Kante leadership has become even stronger under Abe. He has greater control over the policy process than any previous prime minister. This emergence of a Kante-centered policy-making system brings with it greater coherence to the policy process and greater accountability. The old system with its powerful factions and its complex power game between the government and the LDP, it was much more interesting. I'm glad I was around for all those years of LDP dominance and could enjoy watching this game being played. But it was interesting in much the same way that the operations of Tammany Hall and that's how I grew up in in Brooklyn, New York was interesting. All the daily machine in Chicago, all the politics in the democratic one-party southern states before the civil rights movement in the 1960s. It was interesting in the way that those politics were interesting, but it would be anachronistic if that system continued in Japan today. So these changes, I think represent the modernization, the evolution in a very positive sense of Japanese politics. But the concentration of power in the Prime Minister's office brings with it its own dangers, especially when you have such a weak political opposition. Having an opposition, having opposition parties that were a permanent opposition was perhaps not so problematic when the LDP itself operated like a coalition of party-like factions. When individual cabinet ministers didn't hesitate to make policy pronouncements without clearing them with the Prime Minister's office. And when new LDP candidates running in these multi-membered districts took policy positions critical of the government. There was more of a turnover between incumbent and new diet members under the old system than under the current system. But a lot of the turnover happened within the LDP, so there were three LDP incumbents running in a five-member district, one or two of them might be defeated by a new LDP candidate who's arguing against the party's position. That doesn't happen now. But now that the Prime Minister's power over the cabinet and over the party is so strong, the question that arises in Japan is where are the checks and balances necessary for a democratic polity going to come from? And this question has taken on a new urgency since it's not only the opposition parties that have become less vigorous, but the liberal media as well. The ASEI Shimbun in particular having lost much of its influence in shaping public opinion. So the question then that comes up is this. Given the power that I've described here that the Prime Minister exercises over the party and the two-thirds majority that his party has in the lower house and with the Komeito in the upper house as well, the question arises, why hasn't Abe done more to push through major reforms, to push through the so-called third-arrow structural reforms? No doubt, the economy is in some ways stronger now than it was when Abe came into office as Ambassador Sucker was explaining to us to a few of us last evening over dinner. But, Abe Namics has failed to achieve the goals it set for itself. Monetary policy has not achieved this two-percent inflation target. The three arrows, monetary policy, stimulative fiscal policy, a growth strategy based on fundamental structural reforms. These three arrows was supposed to be bundled together. The idea which goes back to an old Japanese fable being that while it's easy to break one arrow, tying three arrows together makes them too strong to break. But these arrows have not been linked. They're not connected. The third arrow has not taken aim at important structural issues. And the second arrow of fiscal stimulus, it seems to me, especially the most recent package that the package that Abe is submitting to the Diet this fall, the second fiscal stimulus is reverting the kind of old-style LDP public work spending and pork barrel spending. And many observers are wondering now whether this first hour of monetary policy is close to being broken, that is to losing its effectiveness. I think that Prime Minister Abe oversold Abe Namics, creating unrealistic expectations, making it seem as though he was going to undertake all more radical reforms than I believe he ever intended or that he could have hoped to accomplish. I think Prime Minister Abe has always been a critic at least before he became Prime Minister this time of American-style capitalism. And unlike Koizumi, he doesn't talk of the desirability of small government. Shisanasefu is an expression I have never ever heard Prime Minister Abe use. He doesn't believe in Shisanasefu and a small government. He's much more comfortable with a meaty-style government hand in guiding the private sector. Much more comfortable with that than the hands off, leave it to the market approach that Koizumi and his economic minister, Takenaka Heizo, are favored. Clearly, Prime Minister Abe wants to secure his place in Japanese history as the Prime Minister who freed Japan from its post-war regime, who restored a sense of pride in the nation's traditions that he thinks had been lost, and who will define a new leadership role for Japan and world affairs. He has not driven an economic policy in the same manner. And even where he would like to make bold moves, he hesitates. Abe and the LDP, they learned from the party's surprising defeat in 2009 that Ubers is dangerous. In this summer's upper house election, he stayed away from the issue he's passionate about, constitutional revision. The LDP won that election handedly, but it wasn't really a landslide as the newspapers tended to portray it. A landslide would have had the Democrats do no better than they did three years ago when they won 17 seats, but they won about over 30, less than six years ago, and these elections are held every three years for six-year term, so less than six years ago, but more than the Democrats should have won given the party's unpopularity. And they did as well as they did because of voters who don't support the Democrats, but decided to cast a vote against the LDP. So for those of you familiar with American politics, upper house elections in Japan are like U.S. midterm congressional elections. They offer the voters an opportunity to send a message to the party in power that they're not satisfied with its performance without throwing it out of office. Abe got the message. I think he got the message after this July election that 28 trillion yen, comprehensive economic package that he announced after the election, in my view is mostly smoke and mirrors, an attempt to convince the public and financial markets that the government is taking bold action when it's really not doing anything of the kind, but there's no evidence that the announcement effect didn't much good. The market reaction was negative and the public reaction in Japan was kind of neutral. People generally are not very critical of Abe and the public opinions reflect high support. They don't think his policies are making the economy much better, but they give him credit for trying and they believe he is doing about as much as it is realistic to expect and probably better than anyone else would do. And there's no question that the public likes that he's making himself a visible presence on the world stage, including appearing on the stage in Rio as Super Mario. So even if Abe were more committed to radical reform than I believe he is, he has to deal with a political reality. The political reality is that the public, the Japanese public does not want to see Japan emulate America's fire it will labor market or have corporations buy up large tracks of agricultural land with no guarantee that they would keep the land for agricultural purposes or that they would not find ways to drive independent farmers who want to continue to till the land to sell. They don't want their social security benefits to be cut and they don't want to see immigration. At least not a formal immigration policy, though many people probably increasing numbers of people grudgingly accept the need for guest workers and for people to work at the low end of the service industry. When it comes to immigration, the business sector, and I think probably Prime Minister Abe himself are more liberal than the public. Many of my economist friends believe that the problem is that Abe simply has not gone far enough with structural reforms that would boost productivity, especially labor market reform. But whether the issue be labor market reform, immigration, agriculture, compelling companies to raise wages, bringing large numbers of women into the mainstream labor force, the ability of the government to act, of any government act, whatever the preferences of its leaders depends on gaining the support of a public. A public that, as I've suggested, resists very much the kinds of changes that these reforms would bring about. So I think that the idea that government in Japan can raise productivity substantially if only it had a government committed to adopting the right policies, policies mostly drawn from an American playbook, is something of an illusion. Many Americans, especially those who support Trump and who supported Bernie Sanders, themselves are demanding that this playbook be rewritten. So for years to come, it seems to me, Japan will be a low growth economy and a wealthy country whose challenge will be how to manage the distribution of income in an environment characterized by growing inequality among a shrinking and aging population. And maybe most important or surely very important, how to reform a higher education system that doesn't do enough to encourage individual initiative and innovation and skills, including language skills, necessary to be successful in a 21st century globalized economy. Abe's clear about his priorities. Constitutional revision, a more robust security policy, a Japan that can't stand tall in the world. And he's realistic enough to know the public's priorities are elsewhere. So he has to be patient and pushing for the changes he wants. He's an interesting personality. He combines strong ideological preferences with a deep pragmatism that keeps him from pressing those preferences too hard too fast. Briefly on the constitution. I think we're gonna see the constitutional debate kind of shift into high gear and I don't think we're gonna see constitutional revision for many years to come, at least for some years to come. Revising Article 9 would eliminate the ambiguity about the legal status of the self-defense forces by saying explicitly that Japan has a military force. But if it were to be amended anytime soon, it probably would combine that with a restrictive definition of what the force can do. It'll be years before Article 9 is revised. And the debate is likely that it's gonna spawn is likely to divide the public rather than generate consensus as to the role of military force as a tool in Japanese foreign policy. I just look at my watch and I know if I keep on talking I'm gonna seize people leaving the room so I'm gonna have to be brief but I have to maybe I have a chance to let you know the questions I can. I'll talk about this in the questions period. The emperor's abdication issue. I think Prime Minister Abe is dealing with this in a very cautious and appropriate manner. He does not want to make this a constitutional issue. The emperor is a symbol of the state. The emperor doesn't have the right, is not in a position to make political decisions. Abdication is a political decision. If you change the fundamental law you're making a political decision. This has to be done not in response to the emperor's desire to abdicate but in response to other issues. But Abe wants, needs to respond to this emperor's desire to abdicate. And I think the answer will be in the diet session held after the turn of the year a new, a special law passed a one time a law that allows this emperor to abdicate. And to have, he needs some space between the emperor's, Okotoba, his speech, requesting this, this indirectly requesting that this happen and actually doing it so that it's in response not to the emperor's request but in response to overwhelming public view that this should be allowed. That's what is going on. I think it's a very appropriate manner to handle this because they have to permit this to happen without opening this Pandora's box. You're gonna have female emperors and you're gonna change the fundamental law about succession and so forth and so on. Now, on foreign relations I need to say a few words about foreign relations before I stop here. There's no question, Abe wants to see Japan stand tall in the world and play a larger political role in the region and globally. In order to maintain a balance of power in East Asia alliance with the United States over the long term is all the more essential than it has ever been. And Abe recognizes this very well. There has been a very interesting and a very important shift on the right about alliance with the United States in Japan. On the right, that is to the right of Mr. Abe, there's always been on the more right, right. An underlying anti-American attitude on the part of the hard right for whom autonomy and independence has meant independence from the U.S., a Japan that can take care of itself. But China has convinced even those pretty far out on the right that alliance with the U.S. and if it's to shore up the credibility of America's commitment to Asia is essential for Japan's security and will become only more so in the coming years and decades. Structural changes in the international system are changing Japan's national security strategy and changing the dynamics of the U.S.-Japan relationship. With the end of bipolarity and the aftermath of America's fleeting unipolar moment, East Asia is moving toward a fluid and ill-defined multipolar system and Japan is evolving a complex foreign policy strategy to deal with it. Post-war Japanese foreign policy did not try to shape the regional order to suit its preferences. It saw the challenge of foreign policy as being able to adjust skillfully and nimbly to the changing trends of the time created by others more powerful than Japan. But Abe, Abe's strategy is more than reactive. He's adjusting Japanese policy to deal with an increasingly assertive China in a region that is in a transition away from American hegemony to one in which the U.S. remains the most powerful country but no longer enjoys a position of unchallengeable military superiority. China doesn't have to match American military power to make the costs to the U.S. of using that power very high. And that cost will continue to increase as China's military grows stronger. The failure of the U.S. Congress to pass TPP. I hope I'm wrong, but I believe that the Congress will not pass TPP in the lame duck session. And that Hillary Clinton, who I pray will become president because I pray even harder that Donald Trump will not. She has locked herself into a position of opposition to TPP that she cannot easily wiggle out of. So TPP is not going to happen at least for some time to come, as I say. I hope I'm wrong, you know. Your Prime Minister is trying to make a case with Congressmen's meeting that how important TPP is. Prime Minister Abe did so in his meeting with Hillary Clinton. Obama is finally trying to squeeze Republican arms and persuade Republicans to support it, something you should have done a long time ago. So, you know, maybe my pessimism will prove to be wrong, but I think it's not gonna happen. And supporters of TPP, seeing that they're losing the debate over the potential economic benefit to the United States have taken to argue that its passage is of huge geopolitical significance and importance. But I think we shouldn't exaggerate that impact. Whether this trade agreement, and that's what it is, it's a trade agreement. Whether it passes or it fails, the U.S. commitment to Japan's defense will not change. America's military presence and commitments to Asia will not change. And unless Americans themselves convince the rest of the world that the failure to pass what most Americans and a majority of Congress believe is a bad agreement, unless we convince the rest of the world that by failing to pass this bad agreement that this signals a more general retreat from Asia, it should not have that big a negative impact. Though, of course, you know, for Abe in particular, he sort of walked the extra mile to make some reforms in agriculture to get TPP through and then the U.S. goes and pulls the rug out from under him, he cannot be happy. But I wouldn't exaggerate the importance of the failure of yet another multilateral trade agreement, the Doha Round, TPP, and so on. In this fluid, uncertain political environment, every country in East Asia is thinking and knew about its national security. Japan is no exception and it's taken steps to see that its strategy is relevant to the world as it is now, not as it has been in the past. I think if Abe would leave office tomorrow, Japan's strategy would not fundamentally change, no matter which politician succeeded him. So over the past, you know, in the post-war period, the LDP adopted a large number of self-imposed constraints on the government's security policy, ban on collective defense, on the export of weapons, weapons technology, 1% ceiling on defense spending, prohibition, the acquisition of offensive weaponry and so on and so forth. But the Abe administration has removed or is weakening these constraints and it is pursuing a complex strategy with at least three problems, three important problems. Japan is gonna do more for itself, it's doing more for itself. Do more to strengthen the alliance with the United States and do more to develop security relationships with Australia and with other countries in the Asia Pacific region. His policy is constrained by a public that's hesitant to incur the risks that a larger security role in regional affairs entails and that remains supportive of Japan's very special brand of pacifism. It's a pacifism that says that Japan should not use military force beyond a narrow definition of self-defense, but that the United States should use military force to protect Japanese interests. Given the realities of American politics, the pressure on Japan to do more to contribute to the alliance will grow stronger. The LDP has always had to tread a narrow path between American demands for greater defense efforts and public opposition to them, but I think we will see whether it be Hillary or Trump, a greater pressure on Japan to do more to contribute to the alliance. Finally, I doubt sometimes that we in America appreciate enough that the more active Japan becomes diplomatically and the more it contributes to a balance of power in East Asia, the more it's going to pursue policies it sees in its interests, whether or not the US agrees with them. I don't think we're necessarily prepared for the more assertive Japan that we're likely to see. Our base determination to strengthen relations with Russia is a specially important development. In Varysvastak, he issued what I kind of love call to Vladimir. He visited with him in Sochi a few months ago. He's invited him to Yamaguchi, his home constituency for a summit meeting this December. He's proposed an annual summit at Vladivostok. He signaled an interest in a mutually acceptable resolution of the Northern Islands issue, which means giving up Japan's long standing position that the return of all four islands is a non-negotiable demand. All of this makes sense for Japan in my view, but it's a direct challenge to the US approach, which is to employ economic sanctions to punish Russia for its Ukrainian policy and to vilify Putin. So managing this relationship is gonna, in some ways, gonna be more difficult. I'll conclude with three brief observations. First, Hillary Clinton probably will win the election, though it is far from certain. If Trump wins, no one knows what he will do. It's a very worrisome possibility. If Clinton wins, her positions on many issues will be heavily influenced by positions that have been staked out by Trump and by Sanders. She will have to design a new approach to trade, one that convinces Americans that she's focused on protecting workers rather than enriching large corporations. She will press allies, including Japan, to do more, much more, both in terms of money and mission to contribute to the alliance. And I don't think she'll look kindly on foreign policy initiatives that are not in step with US policy, Russia being the most important one at the moment in terms of US-Japan relations. Second point, I think the US and Japan need to adopt a new approach to deal with Okinawa. More than 40 years after its reversion to Japanese sovereignty, Okinawa is still largely an American military protector. With only 0.6% of Japan's land area, it's home to more than half of the roughly 50,000 US troops in Japan, and three-quarters of US military bases. These bases occupy 20% of Okinawa's land area, 40% of its arable soil. This over-presence of US troops is a source of growing discontent in Okinawa, crystallized in the opposition to the building of a new base at Hinoko. Given the changed technology of war, US strategy is moving toward creating a geographically dispersed military presence in East Asia. This excessive concentration in Okinawa makes those bases increasingly vulnerable to disabling missile attacks for both political and strategic reasons. The US and Japan need to adopt a new policy to radically reduce the US footprint in Okinawa. The third point, final point. Where Japan goes in its national security policy depends above all else on Chinese actions and on the direction of the US-China relations. Japan will do what it has to do to defend itself against China. The question, how do you do that without feeding the Chinese perception that the US and Japan are pursuing a containment policy? How do you avoid the security dilemma escalation of tensions and arms race? How do we pursue parallel, mutually supportive and constructive policies that is the US and Japan towards China? That's the major challenge to the alliance in the many years to come. Thank you.