It was inevitable at some point, but after more than four years of dominating the political landscape, clear signs are emerging that the ruling Liberal Democratic Party is losing its discipline and reverting to some of its bad habits of the past, before they were booted out of power in the 2009-2012 period.
As the Japanese nation approaches the fifth anniversary of the March 11 tragedy, the burden of dealing with the widespread radioactive contamination from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster continues to expand. Now this issue is seriously impacting even a small community in Tochigi Prefecture called Shioya.
One small town’s desperate fight to prevent their community becoming a dump for highly radioactive materials from Fukushima.
On the day before the planned restart of the Sendai Nuclear Power Plant in Kagoshima Prefecture, the Shingetsu News Agency is re-releasing the 22-minute documentary it made during the summer of 2012. Looking back from today’s perspective, we can now perceive that the anti-nuclear movement was at its high tide at that period.
With the passage into law on July 28 of the House of Councillors electoral district reform bill, there has been some amelioration of the wide disparity in the weight of individual votes. Nevertheless, many believe that the reforms of the new law as well are far too timid. It will still remain the case that one person’s vote in some prefectures will have the weight of almost three peoples’ votes in other prefectures.
Interview with Sayo Saruta, Director of the New Diplomacy Initiative.
Taro Yamamoto is a man who must be destroyed, and the Japanese establishment has a very impressive record when it comes to destroying men like this one. Yamamoto’s fundamental crimes are that he is young, marvelously handsome, superbly charismatic, and utterly hostile to the conservatives who rule this nation.
Female executives and government ministers in Japan probably always have a higher bar to cross to really be accepted in their positions. When she was Japan’s first foreign minister, the volatile and sharp-tongued Makiko Tanaka faced unprecedented open defiance from top bureaucrat Yoshiji Nogami. And if that seemed peculiar to the case of the changeable Tanaka, not many years later a quite similar thing happened to the first, and so far only, female defense minister, Yuriko Koike.
Japanese activists petition their government to abandon plan to export Fukushima food as Overseas Development Assistance.
Actor Taro Yamamoto explains why he has become active in the anti-nuclear movement and what happened when a group of anti-nuclear activists stormed the Saga prefectural headquarters.
