Beyond Toru Hashimoto personally, the contentious comments made by the young Osaka mayor and Japan Restoration Party co-leader are having a powerful effect on the Japanese political world. To take just one poll, the Nihon Keizai Shinbun found that the 9% who had been planning to vote for this political party in the July House of Councillors election before Hashimoto and Ishihara’s comments on comfort women and prostitution has now dropped to only 3%.
Since we are based in Tokyo and not in Washington DC, we may not be the best source available for understanding US government policy, even its policy toward Japan and Asia. Nevertheless, it’s hard not to notice that the Obama administration is taking an unexpectedly cool posture toward Shinzo Abe and his band, and that this is having a major political effect here as well. It is also obvious that the Obama policy toward Japan is radically different than what US policy was a decade ago under George W. Bush.
For several months we had been thinking that the success of the Nuclear Regulation Authority, or NRA, might represent one of the truly under-appreciated stories of 2013. For most of the anti-nuclear crowd the NRA could never really win much admiration because they dispute a fundamental premise upon which this organization was built — that nuclear energy could ever really be safe in earthquake-prone Japan no matter how strict the regulations.
The third consecutive Japanese prime minister has embraced the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), and this time it is probably for real—at least as far as entering the negotiation process goes. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe used his much-awaited visit with US President Barack Obama to crow a little bit about how he was “restoring” the US-Japan Alliance after the three dark years of the Democratic Party of Japan.
After about a year of hanging about in the background, the issue of Japan’s participation in Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations was suddenly thrust back into the front rank of political debate.
