Jake Adelstein - Japan Has a New Emperor and a New Era, but a Dark Future
Prime Minister Abe and his political base
are members of a Shinto cult and political lobby, Nippon
Kaigi, which believes that Japan must shed the shackles of a “U.S. imposed”
democratic constitution, popular sovereignty, basic human rights, pacifism, and
gender equality. Abe and most of his cabinet members believe that the Japanese
people are divine descendants of the gods, World War II was justified, and that
emperor worship should be restored.
The name of Japan’s
new imperial era, Reiwa, was announced on April Fools’ Day with
great fanfare and a great big linguistic lie. The official government party
line is that it translates as “Beautiful Harmony,” but what it means literally
is more Orwellian: “Commanded Peace.” Of course, a certain
portion of the Japanese population realizes that the explanation given for the
new imperial name is not the truth, but they probably were not surprised.
Japan has grown numb
to the deceptions and lies of its elected rulers. As of January this year, for
instance, 79 percent of the Japanese public no longer believed the Japanese
government’s statistics, and you probably shouldn’t either. Everybody lies, they
say, but there’s a problem with lying to yourself and to the public, because
reality doesn’t listen. While the Japanese government relentlessly promotes the
image of “Cool Japan” and mega-tourism, the current reality is a country run
by sociopathic
Hitler-loving plutocrats, with plummeting press
freedom, endemic poverty, rising
censorship, deliberate
destruction of public records, continual death
by overwork, a corrupt
bureaucracy, and a
medieval justice system. Despite the triple meltdown of Fukushima, the
government is rushing to
start nuclear power plants again with reckless abandon.
The population is
aging and shrinking. One out of five citizens is now over 70; in 2017, nearly
400,000 more people died in Japan than were born. Abysmal working conditions,
low wages, lack of maternity leave (not to mention paternity
leave) a chronic shortage of affordable daycare, and excessively long hours
virtually ensure Japanese women and men don’t have time to date, mate, or
procreate. Raising a kid alone?
Very difficult. If a woman chooses to be a single mother there is a 50 percent
chance she will live in poverty. The failure of anything approaching a baby
boom over the decades is already invisible. The shortage of workers is forcing
many businesses to close.
Women might take up
the slack of a worker shortage, but sexism
is rampantand gender inequality is institutionalized: Japan ranks 110 out
of 149 countries in the World Economic Forum’s global gender equality
rankings for 2018. Japan is working on haphazard plans to
introduce foreign labor that are exploitive and doomed to fail in an
environment where xenophobia
is encouraged as is homophobia. read more:
