Three Fine Things In The Background

Three very fine things giving a frisson when looking at the images broadcast of Their Imperial Majesties' visit to the war memorials in the Republic of Palau:

1) That it is Muraki Atsuko, there on the left in the above screen shot from NHK, who is the master of ceremonies. Muraki is one of the very few victims of a prosecutorial frame-up to ever to win full exoneration and restitution, with the prosecutor who fabricated the evidence against her going to prison in her stead. (Link)

2) That Muraki is not just some flunkey or monomaniacal freak but a straight arrow, high-achieving, dedicated human being in what can only be described an awesome marriage whom the prime minister can take pride in having appointed to the highest office available to her in what was then only the second appointment of a woman as a vice minister. (Link)

3) That it is the Vice Minister of Health, Labour and Welfare presiding at the commemoration events at the newly refurbished memorial on the island of Peliliu, not the Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs -- making it crystal clear once again that it is the MHLW, not MOFA, that is in control of war memory in Japan.

From The Places They Have Seen We Might Know Who They Are

This morning Prime Minister Abe Shinzo paid a visit to the Tomioka Silk Works, Japan's first Western-style silk production facility, recently named a UNESCO World Heritage Site. He paid tribute to the citizens' groups which had cared for the site through its many decades of sleepy neglect and who spearheaded the drive to have the site designated a part of the world's heritage (Link). The prime minister also showed his appreciation for the women whose labors inside Tomioka and Japan's other giant silk mills produced the export yen that helped pay for the national strengthening policies of the Meiji Era.

Local community efforts, women working with the nation reaping benefits, international recognition - all great political messages to latch onto and integrate in the prime minister's Abenomics master narrative.(Link - J video)

However, in the "recognition for the previously under-recognized" travel league, the prime minister got trounced this week by their Imperial Majesties.



Yesterday the Emperor and the Empress finished a forty six year long project of national contrition and inclusiveness. They visited the Tohoku Shinseien, a former leprosarium, fulfilling a promise made in 1968 to visit all the former incarceration sites for sufferers of Hansen's Disease. (Link - J video)

Japan's leprosariums, where education and care was minimal, stayed in operation decades after other countries had ceased to isolate their Hansen's disease sufferers. It was not until 1996 that the draconian Leprosy Control Act was repealed. It took a 2001 unconstitutionality ruling by the Supreme Court (a rarity) to open the door for the Koizumi Cabinet to apologize for successive Japanese governments's violations of the patients's civil and human rights. (Link)

Their Highnesses's travel itineraries do not shirk revisiting the dark sides of the country's history. In May they visited the areas affected by Ashio Copper Poisoning Disaster, indicating that his Highness was not entirely displeased by House of Councillors member Yamamoto Taro's clumsy reinactment of the Tanaka Shozo Appeal last year -- and that their Highnesses are keeping their eyes on the government's fumbling at Fukushima Daiichi. In June their Highnesses paid their respects at the location of the wreck of the wartime evacuation ship Tsushima Maru, sunk by a U.S. submarine in August 1944 with loss of 1418 persons, most of them children. (Link - J)

It is hard not to love the Emperor and Empress for their efforts, at their advanced ages, to promote a full and complete reckoning of the nation's history.

Which suggests an intriguing idea. If Abe Shinzo's views of history make him unsuitable to meet or invite to China or South Korea, how about inviting their Imperial Majesties instead? By inviting them one proves that one's problems are with the policies of the Japanese government, not the Japanese people. One also gives oneself a wonderful chance to get off the merry-go-round of hatred and suspicion the region finds itself on.


Images courtesies: NHK News

The Marriage Of The Millennia

You have got to be kidding me.

No, that is not the correct explosive expression of emotion.

OK, now we know that history in Japan is truly over.

There, that's better.

The news is that Her Highness Princess Noriko will be marrying the son of the chief priest at Izumo Taisha.

What is unbelievable about that?

That an imperial princess is marrying the son of the chief priest at Izumo Taisha.

Imagine, for example, an announcement that the daughter of Ali Al-Sistani was to marry the son of Abdul Rahman Al-Sudais. That is sort of how crazy this announcement is, from a religious history perspective.

And yet, in the English language articles on the wedding announcement -- like this just-the-facts Mainichi report (Link) or this too-embarrassingly-sycophantic-to-read version from, where else, the Yomiuri Shimbun (Link) -- not a even a whiff of the astonishing bridging of a religious feud going back close to two millennia.

From The Holy Crap Department, An Announcement

"Shusuke Nomura gave his life to the Divine in front of a lot who do not believe that a human being can communicate with the Divine through one's life," Hasegawa stated. She added, "No matter what the (late Emperor Showa's) Humanity Declaration said, and no matter what the Constitution states, our Emperor once again became a living god" through Nomura's act, effectively rejecting the Constitutional stipulation that the Emperor is a symbolic monarch.

Nomura Shusuke was an ultra-right activist and party leader. On 20 October 1993 he committed suicide in the guest reception room on the 15th floor of the headquarters of The Asahi Shimbun. He had demanded a meeting with the persons responsible for the publication of a derogatory drawing depicting his Association of the Wind (風の会) as The Louse Party (虱の党). Not getting the attention he felt he deserved, he shot himself.

The Hasegawa in the above quote is Hasegawa Michiko, one of the three persons whom Abe Shinzo appointed to Board of Governors of national broadcaster NHK on October 25 last year. The quoted remarks are from a memorial essay she published as part of a special tribute to paid to Nomura on the 20th anniversary of his suicide.

I am not making this up.

Seriously, I am not making this up.

Read the Mainichi Shimbun's English-language article about the whole matter here.

It is official now: the excrement has hit the rotary air motion device.

The Asahi Shimbun Embarrasses Itself Again

A few posts ago I showed disrespect toward the The Asahi Shimbun as regards the Yamamoto Taro letter affair. Alone among the major newspapers it had not released an editorial about the incident at the Emperor's autumn garden party, despite the intense and divisive constitutional issues involved. "[I]t is all so below them, I guess," I snarked.

Well, ten days after the incident, the editors of The Asahi Shimbun finally checked in -- with an editorial written from such an Olympian perspective that reading it gives us poor commoners a crick in the neck. (Link)

I will stop calling The Asahi Shimbun a political eunuch with absurd pretentions of being Japan's The New York Times when its editors get their duffs off their clouds and start tossing around some mud like the rest of us.

Want to be dispassionate? Fine. Want to be neutral? Don't. It's too close to neutered.

OSIIOIIDI *

* Oh Sure, It Is OK If I Do It

私としては、このような政府の行為は日本国憲法の要請である天皇陛下の政治的利用の禁止に抵触するものであり、断じて容認できないと考え、次期通常国会をはじめとするあらゆる場において、憲法第三条に定められた内閣の責任を追及していく覚悟です。

"For me, this kind of government action represents an infringement of the ban upon the political use of the Emperor, as set down in the Constitution. I simply cannot accept it, I am prepared, as a first order of business, to pursue, in the next regular Diet session, the Cabinet's responsibility for this infringement under Article 3 of the Constitution -- and pursue it everywhere else as well!"

That was Liberal Democratic Party Policy Research Council Chairman Ishiba Shigeru, writing in his blog on December 15, 2009 about what was clearly in his mind a heinous abuse of the constitutional status and royal person of Japan's fragile 75 year-old monarch.

What the Democratic Party of Japan-led coalition government did was ask the Imperial Household Agency to arrange a brief private chat at the Imperial Palace between His Majesty and then Vice-President of China Xi Jinping. The Agency initially rejected the government's request based upon an internal rule that all requests for Imperial audiences must be made at least 30 days in advance. The Hatoyama government had put in its application 19 days prior to the proposed meeting date. Backed by the DPJ's then Secretary-General and China Best Friend Ozawa Ichiro, the government persisted (or insisted, depending upon your politics). In the face of pressure, the Agency relented, agreeing to arrange an audience.

The government's pushing for a reversal of the Agency's decision unleashed a storm of protest from both the opposition LDP and right wing activists, an uproar abetted by Grand Steward Haketa Shingo's unprecedented public complaints about the government's actions. (Link)

Despite the acrimony, including the ultra-rightists protesting in front of the Palace (Link), the meeting went off without a hitch, with Japan emerging a big symbolic winner.

Fast forward four years. An LDP-led coalition government rules Japan. Ishiba is now Secretary-General of the LDP.

In an agreement signed in May, the Abe government confirmed its readiness to send Japan's now 79 year-old monarch and his equally frail spouse on a state visit to the healthful confines of India (Link) a visit that K. V. Kesavan alerts us, begins on November 30. (Link)

India...kind of far away...maybe kind of arduous...

Last month, Grand Steward Kazaoka Noriyuki questioned the propriety of the government's urging Princess Hisako to travel to Buenos Aires in order to shore up the Tokyo bid for the 2020 Olympics. Chief Cabinet Secretary Suga Yoshihide gave Kazaoka a public tongue lashing for having the gall to try to divine what their Imperial Majesties were thinking about the Princess' trip. (Link)

Princess Hisako's participation led to questions from all quarters regarding the use of the Imperial institution to political ends (Link). In a development that will likely leave some scratching their heads (aren't Japan's right wingers a cabal?) arch-nationalist cartoonist Kobayashi Yoshinori blew his top -- mocking the government's official explanation that the Princess was only attending in order to thank the international community for its contributions to disaster relief and recovery in the Tohoku region. In Kobayashi's view, to see the dispatch of the Princess as anything but use of the Imperial House for political gain would be inane. (Link)

Kobayashi's being a stickler about keeping the Imperial Family above politics comes as something of a surprise. Then again, Kobayashi has been of late marching to the beat of his own drummer.

As it turns out, the decision to have Princess Hisako address the IOC congress was a masterstroke. Unlike the terrifying sing-song and presumably English-language presentations by eye candy like fencer Ota Yuki and gymnast Tanaka Rie, Princess Hisako, a Cambridge graduate and translator before she married Prince Takamado (the Prince, in his charming, off-kilter way, proposed marriage to her in English) marched through the text of her opening speech both in more-than-acceptable French and then The Queen's English.

The political taint of Princess Hisako's dispatch to Buenos Aires pales, of course, besides the government decision to have their Imperial Majesties preside over the first official commemoration of the anniversary of the end of the Allied Occupation. That celebration, fraught from the outset by the slap to the face it delivers to Okinawa (Link) descended into farce when the hopped up hyper-patriot almost exclusively LDP and Japan Restoration Party attendees hooted out a triple “Long live the Emperor!” (Tenno heika banzai!) at the clearly uncomfortable Imperial Couple. (Link)

The hypocrisy of the LDP as regards use of the Imperial House for political ends, as demonstrated by Ishiba’s dudgeon over an afternoon courtesy call at the Palace (so uncool) versus nothing but smiles about a state visit to India (What problem? I do not see any problem) is emblematic of a greater trend. Having the budget under the DPJ government stay the same size but emphasize temporary support for citizens over the permanent laying of concrete ? That's baramaki ("pork barrel politics"). Passing huge supplementary spending bills and reconstituting the funding for the wasteful Construction State? That is setting up the basic conditions for economic expansion. The DPJ's prime minister not visiting Yasukuni? The mark of a squirming, China-coddling, disloyal mindset. Prime Minister Abe's not visiting Yasukuni? The mark of a mature, realistic ethos in the LDP and the Cabinet.

For issue after issue -- expansionist monetary and fiscal policy, ambitious plans for a greater acceptance of women in the workplace, delays in restarting nuclear power plants, tossing the interests of the agriculture sector to the wolves in Trans Pacific Partnership negotiations -- the progressive policies are being promoted and instituted by what is the regressive party, and indeed the most regressive members of that party. Give the DPJ power, and these same policy initiatives would be hacked down from behind by the very  persons currently implementing and promoting them.

So the LDP's electoral slogan "Japan, Let's Take It Back" (Nippon o, torimodosu!)? Not really descriptive of the Abe government's and the LDP's current trajectory.

I have a suggestion:

"Hypocrisy? Just Let Us Get Away With It!"

Nice Touch, Your Majesty

At the official ceremony commemorating the second anniversary of 3/11, his Highness the Emperor just paid tribute to the contributions made by foreign residents of Japan and non-Japanese everywhere to the rescue and recovery efforts in the disaster zones.

Classy gentleman, his Highness.

The Imperial House was one of only three institutions (the others were the Self Defense Forces and U.S. Forces Japan) to have behaved impeccably from very early on in the disasters and in the weeks and months afterward.