Can you talk a bit more about Abe? I knew he gave creepy vibes when strongarming the anime industry but I didn't know about his other policies. How did he leave marginalized people stranded? I'm actually curious. Though I did find out about Japan using cheap South Asian labour and that made me seethe a bit. Don't know if that was Abe or not
idk if you can like call a politician with a public record as having “creepy vibes” as if he was hiding the stuff his admin did but uuuh we have to get 1 big thing out of the way first:
Abe is just the most visible symptom of Japan’s ruling party’s (Liberal Democratic Party) entrenchment in reactionary politics. Nippon Kaigi, a far-right “non governmental” relationship in all but name, is basically a factory where Japan’s far-right politicians come minted out wholecloth to further Japan and the USA’s insanely reactionary agenda. Many of the cabinet members and every prime minister since Abe has come from the organization. Abe serves as a special advisor to Nippon Kaigi still, after “retiring” from politics.
Abe’s relationship with Korea was notoriously awful. While I will readily also combat the idea that Japan as a nation never apologized to Korea, a far-right Korean myth that you can read more about on this post, it is an undeniable truth that Japan’s far right clearly does not take the previous administrations’ apology seriously, both in political spaces with multiple popular cultural spaces, where dogwhistles can be found even in anime that is beloved by westerners like Joshiraku and Sayonara Zetsubo-sensei (unsurprisingly made by the same guy) as well as Hetalia. Abe has basically cosigned all of this.
While this impacts much of other occupied territories, Abe has also specifically taken jabs at Korea’s insistence that Abe admin should do more to discourage people from reopening and putting salt on still-healing wounds over Comfort Women, basically a conscripted corp of women that were used for sexual relief by the Japanese soldiers with horrific conditions. I am not going to go into the conditions in which they suffered since that’d be needlessly triggering people without adding much to the discussion. They were often lied to by recruiters about how this was a work opportunity (something that was available for many of these women, often in wartiem manufacturing) though coercion was also not unheard of. In a more visceral term, they were sex slaves, though surviving comfort women are double-victimized by the unnuanced label, a discussion that you can read more about in Chunghee Sarah Soh’s The Comfort Women Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan. Anyway, Abe has more or less endorsed Japan’s far right’s continued flaunting of this horrific part of Japan’s past, which comes with another round of horrific symbolic sexual violence.
I can also go into forced hard manual laborers that were taken from Korea (as well as China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Phillippines, etc) and whitewashing of its history, a little. One of the the major legacies is of this policy is the Zainichi Korean population in Japan, descendents of those stranded due to largely USA-(more-or-less)direct-ruled Japan’s indifference towards them after the war and the USA-backed ROK’s refusal to normalize relations with Japan until the 1960s. They are often socially and ecnomically disadvantaged due to their background, and suffered continued marginalization under Abe’s rule, especially in social spheres where Abe basically cosigned the far-right calls to violence against the community due to their perceived status as welfare minorities that are leeches in Japan’s society.
As for specifically China, Abe has pivoted even harder towards the USA (a thing I did not know was possible), allowing the USA to use Japan as a staging grounds for Obama and Trump’s brinksmanship towards China. Though Japan does have a gun to its head irt its relationship with the USA occupation forces in Japan (that also largely controls Japanese politics indirectly), Abe took to this opportunity with boundless enthusiasm and concessions that was far beyond what was legally required of him, setting a dangerous precedence for when the USA comes knocking asking for more concessions.
The following ALSO is broadly about (and I’m going to list every territory and countries here to make my point) Vietnam, Phillippines, Indonesia, Laos, Cambodia, Burma, Christmas Island, Gilbert Islands, Andaman Islands, Malaya, Nauru, New Guinea, Sarawak, Brunei, Labuan and British North Borneo, Singapore, Solomon Islands, Attu, Guam, Kiska and Wake Island. Japan’s Yasukuni Shrine, where war criminals are literally apotheosized as Shinto deities that become guardian Kami of Japan, is a place that ususally was not visited by Japan’s prime ministers, due to the fact that they’d be literally venerating people who did horrific harm to its neighbors as literal supernatural entities. Junichiro Koizumi, a prime minister who was tasked with fixing Japan’s economy after its 1992 financial bubble collapsed, realized he could not do this and instead doubled down on courting reactionary culture war issues, including all but officially normalizing the shrine visits. The opposition party’s very brief rule saw this get reversed, but after LDP came back into power, Abe also visited the Shrine.
In addition, in concert with his wife’s insanely reactionary and bigoted private school venture and the education department, he pushed Nippon Kaigi’s view of whitewashed history through the textbook, trying to undo the legnths at which scholars like Ienaga Saburo went to highlight Japan’s imperialism in Japan’s secondary education system.
Indigenous (and Burakumin) rights
Abe’s strengthening ties with the USA puts him at direct odds with the wishes of the Okinawan people, who suffered de jure annexation of their kingdom in 1879 by the Yamato Japanese and de facto annexation of their land by the United States after WW2. Ryukyu islands is more U.S. bases than people (though I’m exaggerating a little, there’s not insignificant amount of land ceded to these fucking bases). They wish for the U.S. to get out of Japan, or at least for the USA to return the land that they had no choice in giving up to them, but Abe’s posturing towards PRC with cozying up to Obama and Trump has only deepened the entrenchment of the USA in Japan, and especially the Ryukyu Islands.
Abe has done nothing for the Ainu people and have consistently left the actual Ainu people out of the discussion. Though this is not entirely Abe admin’s fault (Putin admin shares the fault here), when talking about joint economic ventures with Japan and Russia over the disputed kuril islands, Ainu people that are indigenous to the land* were left out of the discussion. This happened in Hokkaido as well, where wholesale museums and other places were propped up by Yamato people that tells a whitewashed history of Yamato-Ainu relations without instead vitalizing the already existing Ainu cultural ventures. Also, this not as important as like political sovereignity, but before he shat himself out of office, removed the traditional Ainu dance from the Tokyo Olympics’ official ceremonies.
Burakumin, people who are permanent underclass of Japan of all races all over Japan (determined by their families’ professions when the system was set up), also did not benefit materially. Though he said in 2015 that he’d be doing away with douwa policies, designation of places in Japan where Burakumin were allowed to live, many employers already have an idea of where Burakumin comes from due to many not being able to just uproot themselves and changing legal addresses even without the Douwa system and Abe has not put in special protection for them as far as I can remember, so in essence, Abe has done nothing material while laundering platitudes to try and seem progressive.
I am not even going to get into how Abe admin backed all this purely by the fact that this is reflective of like Nippon Kaigi’s more or less official stance on LGBT+ rights. They made the declaration and kept to it.
lmao do I even have to like get into the weeds with this? Though individual local governments and many (not all) local courts have allowed LGBT+ people to attain protected class status, Abe admin stands against discussing formalizing this federally.
Same sex partnerships are given symbolic recognitions locally, but none of these even come close to full legal benefits or recognition that marriage carries. Though more permissive prefectures like Hokkaido has declared same-sex marriage bans to be unconstitutional, more reactionary localities like Osaka has also given conflicting ruling.
Japan was behind even Korea in recognizing transgender legal changes, with even more horrific requirements like surgery, forced sterlization, and having no children under the age of 20. This basically forcibly sterlizes Japanese transgender people or ages them out of living out most of their lives as they wish to live. Korea, in contrast, does not even require surgeries to change legal gender (though in some circumstances, parental permission was strongly encouraged for Korean).
Japan still has legal conversion therapy for minors.
Abe admin has done nothing to prominent and prevalent abuse for the disabled in the workplace, exacerbated by instituting a quota for disabled workers for most workplaces without providing any legal or regulatory protection for the workers.
Abe has personally made disparaging remarks towards disabled people, including remarks towards disabled workers that worked for his office.
I can keep going but you get the point, and I am not going into the weeds with how his courts adjuciated a number of issues favorable to his admin or the even more ultra reactionary views of the ministers in his cabinet, positions that he supposedly had input over.
*though many Ainu in Kurils were displaced from lower Kurils into the upper Kurils and we can get really into the weeds about different Ainu branches, they still unify their identity under the label of Ainu, same as Hokkaido’s indigenous people.
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