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.
As the Western alt-right continues to gain traction, internet humor is proving a useful instrument in hiding the community’s more sinister beliefs and intentions. But why are these extremists using simple cartoon images and jokes for some of their primary indoctrination and radicalization methods?
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.”
One of the reasons why the Left, particularly the Progressives who have not enjoyed much power worldwide for more than a century, keeps losing is because of their fractiousness.
Kurt Campbell, the Biden administration’s National Security Council Coordinator for the Indo-Pacific, is the “brain” behind much of what the Pentagon and US State Department are doing in East Asia today, but his policy approaches do not correspond with the realities of a global US empire now in rapid decline.
Recent revelations regarding the Japanese government’s purchase of US military drones underlines the East Asian nation’s unwillingness to refuse the “requests” of their US allies as they relate to the acquisition of weapons systems.
Major social media companies are increasingly strangling independent news media with subtle shadow banning practices which threaten free speech and the flow of information vital to maintain democratic systems of government.
Ahead of Donald Trump’s second visit to Japan in 2019, a Japanese hotelier invited the US president’s former chief strategist and senior advisor Steve Bannon to give a “special lecture” in Tokyo. That hotelier’s name is Toshio Motoya.
Japan has a race problem. As I’ve catalogued for a quarter century, there are “Japanese Only” signs and rules on businesses nationwide. Refusing entry and service to all “foreigners” on sight, they exclude people who don’t “look Japanese.”
