If you’ve been holding your breath waiting for a serious opposition party to emerge in Japan, perhaps it’s time to come up for air. After getting trounced in last year’s general election, the Democratic Party of Japan (DJP) has shot itself in the foot again—and this time managed to hit some other vital parts as well.

Keizo Nabeshima writes a superb summary of the bogus e-mail scandal that blew up in the party’s face and the politicians that can’t shoot straight in an article titled Party to a Lack of Maturity in the Japan Times. Here’s an excerpt:

In a statement issued last week, the Democratic Party of Japan acknowledged that a fellow lawmaker used a fake e-mail to cook up a scandal implicating a senior official of the governing Liberal Democratic Party with the disgraced former president of Internet startup Livedoor Co.

Citing a copy of the in-house e-mail purportedly sent by Livedoor founder Takafumi Horie to a subordinate, lawmaker Hisayasu Nagata had charged Feb. 16 before the Lower House Budget Committee that Horie ordered the transfer of 30 million yen to the bank account of a son of LDP secretary general Tsutomu Takebe…The question now is how the DPJ will account for its actions in the affair, which exposed its immaturity as a political party.

The entire article can be found here.

The only thing that Nabeshima fails to mention is that the MP who was duped by the fake e-mail, Hisayasu Nagata, is a Japanese version of the educated fool stereotype. A graduate of the elite University of Tokyo, Nagata’s demeanor suggests that he’s one of those Todai grads who thinks his sheepskin entitles him to a life of prestige and fortune without having to do any real work on his own except show up in a suit. One of the party leadership’s biggest blunders in the whole mess was taking a guy like Nagata seriously to begin with, especially when he was backed by only the flimsiest of evidence.