Word: pacifists
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...behind a health minister who called women "baby making machines," a defense minister who remarked that the dropping of the Nagasaki bomb "couldn't be helped" and an agricultural minister whose suspected involvement in financial scandals led him to commit suicide. In making his goal of amending Japan's pacifist constitution to allow a more robust foreign policy the cornerstone of the LDP's July election campaign, Abe ignored voter concerns over bread-and-butter issues at his peril. To placate the calls for his own resignation after the historic loss that followed, Abe sacked his replacement agricultural minister over...
...Japanese navy currently engages in refueling missions in the Indian Ocean to back up NATO-led antiterror operations in Afghanistan, while the air force ferries supplies and personnel from Kuwait to Baghdad and northern Iraq. That may not sound like much, but such operations would have been unthinkable to pacifist Japan as recently as a decade...
...vision of a stronger, more assertive Japan is finished for now. In one of the election's biggest surprises, the LDP's usually reliable coalition partner Komeito performed well under expectations - in part, suggests Jun Iio of the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, because Komeito's generally pacifist supporters have rejected the party's connection with the conservative...
Whatever happens, most observers agree that Abe and the LDP lost by focusing on revising Japan's pacifist constitution and making education more patriotic while ordinary Japanese were more worried about the country's growing income gap and its faulty pension system. Whether or not Abe resigns, the Japanese government will have to put aside its grander ambitions and make pocketbook issues a priority. "Abe couldn't figure out how to balance the people's interests with his own," says Etsushi Tanifuji, deputy dean of politics at Tokyo's Waseda University. Fortunately for Japan, the democratic system...
...first act was to visit Beijing and Seoul, patching up strained relations with Japan's key trading partners. But foreign-policy coups were soon overshadowed by a perception that Abe's domestic agenda was lacking. While he spoke of boosting Japan's role abroad and revising the country's pacifist constitution, the public was focused on bread-and-butter economic issues. "When Abe talks about the constitution, people think, 'What about my salary?'" says the DPJ's Yamaguchi. Abe seems incapable of reading the public-Koizumi excelled at that-and can't shake impressions that the economy bores him. "When...