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.

The lessons of Fukushima are in many respects being ignored.

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

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

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

Japan’s conviction rate is an alarming 99 percent; guilty until very rarely proven innocent.

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.

The overall state of Japanese democracy remains grim, as the LDP has thoroughly dominated what is effectively a one party state.

Dire population projections suggest that by 2050 the overall population could possibly shrink to 100 million from 127 million in 2000.

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).

Much is implicit, requiring people to read the situation and left wondering if they have done so correctly.

For quite some time after the accident [Fukushima], TEPCO tried to blame Prime Minister Kan for delaying and mismanaging its crisis response, but the accusations were groundless.

The quality culture in Japan has eroded due to corner cutting and the globalization of supply chains that requires producers to do more for less.

The Americans also helped by not proceeding with initial plans to dissolve the wartime zaibatsu (family-owned industrial conglomerates), an example of how Occupation policies involved a degree of compromise.

In politics, as of 2018, only 47 of 465 Diet members are women, a lower proportion than in Saudi Arabia,

Not only was TEPCO aware that there was a risk of a monster wave, it also considered building a bigger sea wall to protect the plant from the risk it knew existed. In the end, however, TEPCO decided not to build the $1 billion sea wall that would probably have prevented the meltdowns, what would have been a bargain in retrospect given the estimated $626 billion taxpayers will pay over the next four decades for decontamination and decommissioning the stricken reactors.