Jeff Kingston

Abe and like-minded revisionists of history are a bit like Donald Trump, living in an alternate reality where they can make up their own facts and dismiss inconvenient evidence. These revisionists dominate the ruling LDP, and rue Japan’s reconciliation initiatives while advocating the rehabilitation of Japan’s sordid wartime history in the mistaken belief that this will restore the nation’s dignity.

Japanese society is a pressure cooker, where people are driven by norms, expectations, and rules of conduct that are inculcated from a young age and reinforced in schools, the local community, and the workplace

Okinawa’s lingering trauma is a cost that most Japanese are prepared to endure because they are unaffected by this distant suffering.

Sexual slavery is not unique to Japan, but what is the point of downplaying or denying a well-documented state-orchestrated, widespread system of deceiving and coercing tens of thousands of young women into providing sex to soldiers?

Women remain concentrated in non-regular jobs (58%), where wages are low, and it is stunning that there are no women managers at 73 percent of Japanese firms and that at listed firms only 3.7 percent of executives are women.

By 2000, the relative poverty rate, defined as less than one half the median household income, exceeded 15 percent, well above the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) average of 10 percent

The lessons of Fukushima are in many respects being ignored.

As of 2018, 27 percent of the population is over 65 years of age, and this ratio will nearly double by 2050

There was a secret agreement between Japan and the US that allowed US nuclear weapons into Japanese territory that was concluded when the US–Japan security treaty was revised in 1960, acquiescing to US ships carrying nuclear weapons to transit Japanese waters and call at Japanese ports.

Self-sacrifice for the common good is a much-lauded virtue, one that helps employers pressure workers into working overtime for free (sabisuzangyo) and working excessive hours at the expense of their private life and health, sometimes to the point of death from overwork (karoshi).