Should he be convicted of the crimes of which he will be accused he will, of course, be stripped of his seat. However, the trial could take months, even years. Most analysts predict the verdict will be not guilty.
The political effects of the determination of the No. 5 Committee to indict Ozawa will be significant and immediate. Ozawa is a tough, thick-skinned politician with a long and storied history of fighting on despite suspicions and accusations dogging him. The stigma of actual indictment will make it very difficult, however, for him to carry on in politics as he has done in the past — if he can engage in politics at all.
Of Ozawa it has been said that he does all for the sake of winning elections and also that he has done all for the sake of pushing forward policies. His genius has been in the combination of both, with the ultimate political end of seizing power through the ballot box. He has done this by being a hands-on, forceful politician, jealous of rivals he cannot control. Post-indictment, he will have little choice but to step back from the forefront, mostly in an effort to limit the damage to his subordinates due to their association with him.
To say that his stepping back from the forefront of politics will mean the end of an era is not hyperbole. Though Ozawa has many followers, he has no emulators. No one else does politics the way he does — the careful cobbling together of a myriad small interests into a single large voting bloc — and furthermore no one would want to anymore. It makes far more sense to stake out some basic positions, then make a play for the increasing proportion of non-aligned voters— voters likely to be swayed by a single salient issue or dramatic campaign. No one could or would want to weather the severe criticism from the media that Ozawa’s methods attract — his long absences on political tours of the prefectures when the Diet is in session, his contempt for the press, his seemingly needlessly complex finances — when more boring, party-centered, press-friendly methods are available.
For the DPJ, the order of indictment brings both positives and negatives. A hobbled Ozawa presents far less of threat to party unity, seeing as he could hardly lead a group of legislators out of the DPJ under the banner of his leadership when his very right to remain a member of the Diet is threatened. Challenges to the leadership of party leader Naoto Kan and his close advisors are likely to be more muted than they would have been had various members of the party felt more comfortable to seen in collaboration with Ozawa, or taking hints from him on how to disrupt the management of party affairs.
At the same time, the association with a potential convicted politician will have its downside, particularly in the unlikely event where Ozawa is convicted of some crime.
That the DPJ is ferocious in preserving the presumption of innocence in Ozawa’s case was made clear by the rapid fall of Seishu Makino, former chairman of the DPJ Acting Diet Committee Affairs, who made the unwise suggestion that Ozawa should resign as a member of the Democratic Party. In a rapid turning of the tables, it was Makino who suffered the party’s wrath, being forced to relinquish his post one day after making his suggestion.
Where Ozawa’s forced withdrawal from the forefront of Japanese politics may be most keenly felt is in the DPJ’s relationship with the government of China. Ozawa has for two decades been cultivating close personal relationships with the political leaders in China, having face-to-face meetings with them on an annual basis. These annual visits culminated in a both celebrated and reviled mass visit in December of last year of Ozawa accompanied by 600 persons, including 146 DPJ Diet members.
Having lost a leadership battle to Prime Minister Naoto Kan and now under the looming cloud of indictment, Ozawa has almost certainly lost value as a point of contact for the Chinese government. He will clearly be traveling with a much smaller retinue this year, if he can indeed make the trip to China at all. It is is uncertain whether anyone of great influence will be willing to meet with him.
Ozawa’s longtime cultivation of relations with the PRC government nevertheless remains one of the sources of his remaining leverage over party affairs. Indeed, in the aftermath of the Chinese ship captain’s arrest and release , it was an Ozawa confidant, Goshi Hosono, who was able to win an appointment with Dai Bingguo, the state councilor in charge of diplomatic policy, to start the process of unbending the twisted relations between the leaderships of the two countries. As long as the DPJ’s relations with China remain strained — which is likely to be for the foreseeable future — Ozawa will likely remain a significant player, though one deep in the background.
Michael Cucek is a research associate at the MIT Centre for International Studies and writes about Japanese politics at the Shisaku blog.