Visible Minorities: MAGA’s Roots in Japan
How Japan treats its non-citizen residents and diverse communities is a bellwether for how future neofascist demagogues in other countries will treat their minority voices and views.
How Japan treats its non-citizen residents and diverse communities is a bellwether for how future neofascist demagogues in other countries will treat their minority voices and views.
Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro appears to be plotting a comeback, but his prospects for a return to power–should he not be willing to wait four years until the next election–will very much depend upon who occupies the White House in the years ahead and how deep his support runs within his country’s military.
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.”
Abby Martin, host of The Empire Files, and Paul Jay discuss how working people and the left should respond to the presidential election.
Eric Blanc of Jacobin magazine fears a US corporate Democrat repeat of the 2000 elections when Al Gore refused to fight once the Supreme Court gave the election to George W. Bush.
Since the 1990s, US society has been drawing into two broad camps, which for simplicity’s sake we will call the Reds and the Blues. This year, the polarization between them has reached a new level of passion and intensity. If this polarization descends entirely into a civil war—and the November 2020 elections could very well be a trigger for such a scenario—history suggests that the initial victory would be decisively in favor of the Red fascists.
There’s an oft-used expression in Japanese: sekinin tenka. Best translated as “passing the buck,” it’s a reflex of dodging blame for one’s own actions by transferring responsibility to others. For too long, Japan has done so on the world stage with impunity—even when it affects the world adversely.
A war on economic inequality will be a central feature of the politics of the next decade.
A roundup of the most significant news stories from Japan reported on January 6, 2018.