I passed out last night before I could show my work.
So Abe is a member of Japan’s “Liberal Democratic Party”, Jiyu-Minshuto. They’re consistently right wing, and consistently in power. The name throws people for a loop but do see:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1601459?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contentsOver the years, the LDP has remained in power almost permanently. It’s a catch all clusterfuck of right wing policies growing steadily further right. Traditionally, it publicly excluded Japanese ultranationalist politicians (the equivalent of the GOP letting Steve King exist because he kept his damn mouth shut), but Shinzo Abe represents a new breed of vocal Japanese ultranationalists getting power in real politics. In fact, he’s a special advisor to the parliamentary league of the pro-Emperor, fascist group called Nippon Kaigi, or Japan Conference.
How bad is Japanese ultranationalism? I would like to just point at some of my favorite elements of it via Wikipedia articles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nippon_Kaigi#Criticism“Most, but not all, seek to justify Japan's role in the Second World War to varying degrees, deny the war crimes committed by the military during the pre-1945 Shōwa period and are critical of what they see as "self-hate" bias in post-war historical education. Thus, they do not recognize the legality of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East or other allied tribunals; consider the war-criminals enshrined in the Yasukuni Shrine as "Martyrs of Shōwa" (昭和殉難者 Shōwa junnansha); or support the censorship of history textbooks or historical negationism.[4]”
“National Socialist Japanese Workers' Party (国家社会主義日本労働者党 Kokka Shakaishugi Nippon Rōdōsha-Tō) – a small neo-Nazi party headed by Kazunari Yamada, who maintains a website and blog which includes praise for Adolf Hitler and the September 11 attacks.[11] Pictures of Yamada, a Holocaust-denier, posing with Cabinet minister Sanae Takaichi and LDP policy research chief Tomomi Inada were discovered on the website and became a source of controversy; both have denied support for the party.[11]”
Both from
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyoku_dantaiAnd so forth.
What does this have to do with the LDP and Shinzo Abe?
https://apjjf.org/2013/11/1/Narusawa-Muneo/3879/article.htmlOops. Looks a lot like the LDP isn’t so much a true political party as it is a kind of mask for fascist monarchists to hide behind, because the party is too goddamn old and too long in power to ever let terrible people in charge!
Now, I said that Japanese politics has been a dumpsterfire for a long time, but the most recent non-Shinzo PMs have been members of the Democratic Party of Japan (Minshuto), a center left group. Roughly from 2009 to 2012, in fact.
The details make this more understandable. See, in Japan, a political party is just a way for people to get re-elected. You might say this is true elsewhere (quite reasonably), but in Japan they’re disgustingly blatant about it.
It’s true that the LDP is full of horrible slimy creatures, but there are actual non fascists in it. There are socialists in it. There’s what we in the west would consider far left politicians in it. The only thing that holds the political parties of Japan together is their lust for power: none of their members have a shared ideology.
Going back to when the DJP got into power in 2009, the New York Times said at that time:
“Political analysts and lawmakers say a defeat could even spell the end of the Liberal Democratic Party, which has appeared outdated with no ideology to bind it together beyond a desire to hold onto power. In its place could emerge new, more modern types of political parties bound together by a shared agenda and principles.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/20/world/asia/20iht-20japan.20321139.htmlYep. No ideology, no agenda, no principles lie behind the veil of Japanese political parties. They’re blatantly and openly just trying to cling to power.
The DJP is no different. Most of its politicians were from the LDP, including its chairman and other major figures. The fact is, there’s no real reason to believe that it was any more “center left” than the LDP is “center right”. In fact, labels of left-right are complete nonsense, applied to political parties in Japan (which doesn’t stop people from trying).
Ergo, Japanese politics is and has been a dumpsterfire.
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