January 20, 2010
TOKYO — It had all the trappings of a typical political scandal in a nation that has seen all too many of them: stacks of cash from construction companies, shady land deals and late-night arrests of grim-faced political aides widely seen as fall guys for their powerful bosses.
But the unfolding investigation into possible political finance irregularities by the kingpin of the governing party, Ichiro Ozawa, has also gripped Japan for a very different reason. It has turned into a public battle between the country’s brash new reformist leaders and one of the most powerful institutions of its entrenched postwar establishment: the Public Prosecutors Office.
In a sign of the changing times here, the standoff has brought an unusual outpouring of criticism not just of Mr. Ozawa but also of the enormous discretionary powers of the prosecutors, a small corps of elite investigators long cheered here as the scourge of corrupt business leaders and politicians.
It has also raised questions about whether the prosecutors have not also become defenders of something else: the nation’s stodgy status quo, the powerful and largely unaccountable bureaucracy that Mr. Ozawa’s Democratic Party has vowed to bring to heel after defeating the long-governing Liberal Democrats last summer.
“This scandal has put Japan’s democracy in danger,” said Nobuo Gohara, a former prosecutor who now teaches public policy at Meijo University. “This is the bureaucratic system striking back to protect itself from challengers, in this case elected leaders.”
The latest developments came over the weekend, when prosecutors arrested a Democratic lawmaker and two other former aides of Mr. Ozawa, a skilled but shadowy backroom political operator who was the architect of the Democrats’ historic election victory. It is the latest in a string of investigations by prosecutors into Democratic leaders, including one last month into misreported political funds of the new prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, that have sapped public support for the fledgling government.
However, instead of meekly offering apologies, as many an accused politician has in the past, the Democrats are fighting back. At a party convention over the weekend in Tokyo, Mr. Ozawa called for “all-out confrontation” with the prosecutors.
“We absolutely cannot accept this way of doing things,” he told an applauding crowd. “If they can get away with this with impunity, the outlook is gloomy for Japanese democracy.”
More shocking for many here was support of Mr. Ozawa given by Mr. Hatoyama, who as prime minister has legal authority to exert political control over the prosecutors — a power that only one prime minister has ever exercised since World War II.
“I trust him. Please go ahead and fight” with the prosecutors, Mr. Hatoyama said.
Mr. Hatoyama later promised not to influence the investigation, which political experts say would almost certainly invite a severe public backlash. Still, his party’s resistance has helped encourage widespread criticism among scholars and some parts of the news media that the prosecutors are conducting a vendetta against the Democrats because of their promise to rein in the bureaucracy, of which the Prosecutors Office, an appendage of the Justice Ministry, is a potent part.
Mr. Gohara and other critics do not so much defend Mr. Ozawa, a master of the machine-style politics of the Liberal Democrats, as criticize what they see as the selective justice meted out by the prosecutors, who come down hard on challengers to Japan’s postwar establishment while showing leniency to insiders.
These suspicions have been brewing since early last year, when an earlier investigation into separate fund-raising irregularities forced Mr. Ozawa to resign as head of the Democrats on the eve of crucial national elections. Critics noted that prosecutors focused solely on Mr. Ozawa while declining to pursue Liberal Democratic lawmakers who were also named as taking money from the same company, Nishimatsu Construction.
Then came the second scandal, which broke about a month ago. Some political experts describe these repeated inquiries into Mr. Ozawa as signs the prosecutors are acting as a sort of immune system for Japan’s establishment, springing into action against a politician who they fear is accumulating excessive power with his near-total control of the governing party’s purse strings.
Others describe a decades-old feud going back to prosecutors’ arrest in the 1970s of Mr. Ozawa’s mentor from his days in the L.D.P., former Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka, and say prosecutors fear Mr. Ozawa may be seeking the upper hand after he created a special party committee last year that called on the prime minister to exert more control over the prosecutors.
“The prosecutors fear Ozawa may be trying to turn Japan into his own private empire,” said Yoshiaki Kobayashi, a political scientist at Keio University.
The debate has focused unusual public scrutiny on Japan’s some 2,600 public prosecutors, who are a force unlike any in the justice systems of the United States and other Western democracies. The Prosecutors Office has the right not only to choose who to investigate and when, but to arrest and detain suspects for weeks before filing charges, in effect giving them powers of the police, attorneys general and even judges all rolled into one.
Prosecutors are traditionally drawn from the cream of young law students who have passed Japan’s demanding bar exams. They are known for lightning raids on the offices and homes of their suspects, with lines of stone-faced prosecutors in dark suits marching determinedly past a phalanx of reporters and photographers, tipped off about the raid minutes before.
Indeed, media experts say the prosecutors enjoy close ties with the major news media outlets, which has led to generally positive coverage of the investigation into Mr. Ozawa.
News reports have followed a predictable pattern of stories based on leaks from prosecutors with emerging details of the some $4 million that prosecutors believe he tried to hide by investing it in land in Tokyo. Just as predictably, this negative coverage has turned public opinion against Mr. Ozawa, with most people saying he has not adequately explained where the money came from.
Outraged, the Democrats have vowed to strike back by organizing a team of lawmakers to investigate the prosecutors’ use of leaks to sway coverage.
“This scandal shows how much the new administration is making waves,” said Mr. Gohara, the former prosecutor, “but also how the old system will fight back.”
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