In the winter of 1956-1957, the liberal figure of Tanzan Ishibashi assumed the premiership, aiming to normalize Japan’s relations with the Communist world and to depart from US Cold War policy. However, he was almost immediately felled by a stroke and resigned, leaving the government in the hands of the rightwing Nobusuke Kishi, who had the exact opposite vision for the country.
The ghost of Shinzo Abe’s political and financial corruption has again risen up to haunt his successors, staggering the already weak administration of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.
When former Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi formed a bond in the mid-1960s with Unification Church founder Sun Myung Moon over their shared anti-communist views, little did he know that he was sowing the seeds that would eventually take the life of his beloved grandson, Shinzo Abe.
The Covid pandemic has gradually unleashed political and social forces in Japan that have lifted its underlying xenophobia to the surface, and thus transformed its culture from one of attraction into one of repulsion for many of its previous admirers.
A roundup of the most significant news stories from Japan reported in the second half of July 2019.
A roundup of the most significant news stories from Japan reported on January 23, 2019.
In 1993, Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono made the most full-throated admission and apology acknowledging that Japan had coerced women across Asia into being sex slaves—euphemistically referred to as “Comfort Women”—for the Japanese military during the Pacific War. More recently, however, conservative politicians such as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Osaka Mayor Hirofumi Yoshimura have engaged in a campaign that is less about carving out a path toward reconciliation than to overwrite memories of an unsavory past.
A roundup of the most significant news stories from Japan reported on November 4, 2018.
The decision by the Abe government to return Ambassador Yasumasa Nagamine to Seoul and Consul-General Yasuhiro Morimoto to Busan represents a total failure of Japan’s current approach to diplomatic relations with its closest neighbor, South Korea.
Donald Trump’s comments about the potential need for the United States to retract its responsibility to defend Japan helps conservative Japanese politicians bolster this East Asian nation’s military posture.
