IF you read only the Economist, you would have a dim view of the new (and former, 2006 and 2007) Japanese Prime Minister, Mr. Shinzo Abe.

Here are excerpts from a leader (which Filipino journalists would call an editorial or staff-written commentary) in The Economist’s January 5 print edition.  The piece, under the slug “Japanese foreign policy” has the cute title “Down-turn Abe.”  The pun adverts to a current drama miniseries hit in London “Downton Abbey.”  The leader has the drop heading “The country’s dangerously nationalists new cabinet is the last thing Asia needs.”
We are retaining The Economist’s British spelling.

“The new prime minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), wants to emphasise security. In economic terms, ordinary Japanese feel vulnerable. The country is back in recession, and doubts are growing about whether the state can meet its long-run commitments to the elderly. In terms of external security, Japan faces the most perilous situation in years. Wayward North Korea is on the way to developing a nuclear warhead and the missile technology to deliver it. Japan has island disputes with all three of its neighbours, Russia, South Korea and China, leaving it diplomatically isolated in its near-abroad. Escalating Chinese aggression over Japan’s control of the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu islands raises the very real (if underappreciated) prospect of conflict.

“Yet if security is the word, then Mr Abe’s new cabinet rings alarms on both counts. It is short of economic modernisers. Taro Aso, the finance minister, has proposed the sort of budget stimulus he implemented as prime minister in 2008-09, at the height of the global financial crisis. But there has been no attempt to link this short-term splurge to long-term fiscal discipline, and proposals for bold structural reforms are thin on the ground. The idea of joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a free-trade grouping, seems likely to be quietly dropped. For the rest, economic policy amounts to bashing the central bank and pandering to the ‘nuclear village’ of big business which wants Japan’s unpopular reactors switched back on.

“In foreign policy the government looks even more alarming. Calling the cabinet conservative misses its revisionist obsessions (see article). It is far from meritocratic, with half the positions going to MPs who inherited Diet seats from their families. Worse, its members are gripped by a backward-looking, distorted view of history that paints Japan as a victim. The great majority of cabinet members favour visits to Yasukuni, the controversial Tokyo shrine that honours war criminals among the soldiers, and reject Japan’s “apology diplomacy” for its wartime atrocities. Almost half of them want school textbooks (which already downplay Japanese atrocities) to be rewritten in ways that obscure the militarism still further. Mr Abe is, alas, steeped in this stuff: his grandfather oversaw occupied Manchuria’s development in the 1930s.       

“The revisionists’ real argument over perceptions of Japan’s wartime conduct is that their country was treated to victor’s justice. They reject the pacifist constitution that America imposed. Japan was cast as a junior partner, they maintain, and neutered at home and abroad.

The education minister, Hakubun Shimomura, says that the years since the war have been a ‘history of Japan’s destruction’; he and Mr Abe talk about overturning a despised ‘post-war regime’. This is a baffling portrayal of the economic miracle—overseen by the LDP, no less—that brought peace and prosperity to the region.
        
“We’re all victims now
“In a part of the world that specialises in victimhood, this is dangerous. If Mr Abe rescinds Japan’s 20-year-old apology to wartime ‘comfort women,’ he will provoke South Korea (see article). The stakes are even higher with China, whose own idea of victimhood is also nourished by its manipulation of history. China is now stoking tensions over the Senkakus. Last month a surveillance plane buzzed the islands, the first recorded Chinese incursion into Japanese-controlled airspace.

“This puts America in an awkward spot. Mr Abe, despite his views on the constitution, wants to cultivate closer ties. When China is aggressive, Mr Abe needs its full support. But that should not extend to rewriting history or provoking China (let alone South Korea). This cabinet is a bad start.”

Contrary US view
America’s Time magazine, however, in its online edition, on January 3, ran a Reuters article by Toru Hanai titled “Japan’s Not-Quite-So-Nationalist Leader.”

The article begins with the lead “For a supposed nationalist and right wing hawk, Japan‘s new prime minister, Shinzo Abe, doesn’t seem to have his heart in it.  Count on Japan’s long-suffering and largely misunderstood public to keep things that way—at least until the next election.”

The Time article details how “Abe took office last week after a campaign that featured tough talk on territorial disputes, defense and war history…” and soon reversed himself. “He appointed a largely moderate Cabinet, dispatched special envoys to improve relations with neighbors and dropped his most strident nationalist rhetoric.”

“Most notably, he backed off plans to establish a government presence on the Japanese-controlled Senkaku Islands, the scene of a dangerous standoff with China. And he dropped plans to declare a ‘Takeshima Day’ to reinforce Japanese claims on a small island controlled by South Korea. Either move would have raised tensions – if not provoke a violent confrontation – while doing little to resolve the territorial disputes.” 

As a result China even expressed hopes that the new Japan PM would “meet China halfway” and therefore promote goodwill and peace in the region.

Condemn Abe’s comfort women revisionism
The world should, however, condemn Mr. Abe for his new attempt to clear Japan’s Second World War military of the crime having abducted Chinese, Korean, Filipino and other Asian women to turn them into sex slaves to meet the animal needs of Japanese soldiers.

PM Abe and his LDP tried to do this is in 2007. Their effort met worldwide condemnation.  He said then and said again recently that there is no proof that the women were coerced. They magnified this insult by saying Japan had paid reparations to countries for the use of comfort women and other atrocities.

Mr. Abe and his education minister must not be allowed to erase Japan’s 1990 official apology for the atrocities and the cruel abuse of the Asian comfort women.  In this, they are exactly like those who deny that the holocaust that victimized millions of Jews in Germany really happened.