Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has outlined what appears to be a sincere effort to realign Japan’s position on nuclear weapons–from one that supports the maintenance of the US “nuclear umbrella” to one that aims for gradual global nuclear weapons disarmament.
It was exactly a month ago today that Shinzo Abe was assassinated in Nara by 41-year-old Tetsuya Yamagami. As the passions of that event begin to settle, this is an opportune occasion to reconsider both the benefits and the costs of an administration which lasted longer than any other in Japanese history.
The assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has occasioned a lot of valuable, eye-opening discussions in the media, but few if any have focused upon how Abe’s death could be seen as a form of karmic payback–what happens when you ignore the lessons of history in the pursuit of raw political power.
This SNA Speakeasy features Ulv Hanssen of Soka University on the theme of “Anti-Korean Hate Books in Japan.”
With a constant barrage of berating comments like “you are lowering Japan’s image,” “feminists are garbage,” and “women aren’t fit to be working,” the fight for female rights and dignity within Japanese online spaces seems to be a neverending battle.
An ugly legal battle has broken out in recent months between one of the biggest names in Japan’s multi-billion dollar pachinko industry and his own daughter, who accuses him of trying to pressure her financially to divorce her husband because he is black.
The editors of the Japan Times published an announcement today regarding its now infamous “Editor’s Note” of November 2018, with the evident purpose of drawing a line under the affair and to recover their reputation for “fair, accurate and transparent journalism.” Unfortunately, it seems that the newspaper’s internal investigation bypassed all of the most serious and credible allegations.
Whereas most Japanese political parties, whether the ruling conservatives or the mainstream opposition, effectively have little in the way of fixed party policies, the Japan Communist Party, the nation’s oldest political party, is very different, taking its own platforms very seriously.
After almost three-quarters of a century it appears unlikely that Japan will ever receive an apology from the United States for its horrific atomic bombings.
A roundup of the most significant news stories from Japan reported in the second half of July 2019.
