Today Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will form his third cabinet since his December 2012 return to power. It will look an awful lot like the second cabinet, the only difference being that underperforming Defense Minister Akinori Eto will be dropped in favor of veteran hand Gen Nakatani.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s rather bizarre decision to call an early general election at a juncture that is distinctly unfavorable to his personal interests has set analysts ablaze, wondering how many seats the LDP-Komeito coalition can lose before Abe’s gambit would be judged a political failure.
When a colleague recently asked us if we’d heard the rumor that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was considering a snap election in December, our first response was to wave it off as quite implausible. As we began to read such stories in the Japanese media, our second reaction was to view it as a likely bluff that the prime minister is using to discipline his own restive party members over the consumption tax hike issue.
There’s a whole lotta shaking going on in Tokyo.
The government deals itself all the cards in deciding what constitutes acceptable journalism about official policymaking.
The various dramas occurring today near Henoko beach, Okinawa, and the city of Ferguson, Missouri, undoubtedly have many points of difference, but it is worth reflecting briefly on some issues that unite these two cases.
There are many reasons for the hapless condition that the Japanese political opposition has fallen into, but one of the biggest factors surrounds the state and ambitions of the largest remaining opposition party, the Democratic Party of Japan. The question, put simply, is whether or not the DPJ should focus on trying rebuild itself into a party that may one day govern the nation again, or if it has fallen so low in public esteem that its lawmakers would better advised to jump ship and to start afresh with a new political party.
Abe steps into uncomfortable territory when he appeared at Rengo’s annual May Day rally in Yoyogi Park.
The script has all the right drama: Two former Japanese prime ministers, deeply disappointed by their bungling successors, rise from comfortable retirement to do political battle once more. And, yes, there is good cause too.
Former Ginowan Mayor Yoichi Iha says anti-base sentiment in Okinawa remains the consensus.
