Japan: Shinzo Abe’s Government Has a Thing About Hitler. It Likes Him.

TOKYO—Imagine a world in which the Nazis and Imperial Japan won the second world war—that’s the premise of the critically acclaimed TV series The Man In The High Castle, which is science fiction. But as a matter of fact, the grandson of a war criminal, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, seems intent on turning that dark fantasy into something more like a reality TV show. The premiere is scheduled for 2020, and he’s drawing on some classics for the scenario: Mein Kampf recently was approved for Japanese classrooms, and the suggestively titled Hitler’s Election Strategy is popular with some members of the Abe Cabinet.

Ominously, Abe announced on May 3 plans to dismantle Japan’s postwar democratic constitution and replace it with one that owes a debt to the Nazis’ revision of the German constitution in the 1930s, and this week his political party will ram through a conspiracy bill that is straight out of Imperial Japan’s darkest days: those two decades from 1925 to 1945 when people who criticized the government or wrote the truth about the war effort simply vanished in the middle of the night and were not seen again. It’s a bill so awful that the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights wrote Abe a letter raising concerns that the new law could allow police to trample on civil liberties.

On Monday, the Abe administration responded with a very public and not very polite missive which, when translated with an understanding of the subtleties of Japanese language and culture, amounts to, “Fuck off.” Just like the Nazis of days past, Japan’s rulers don’t deal well with criticism.

Comparing a political party to the Nazis in any form is generally considered the lowest form of political criticism, but it’s no longer possible to resist the comparison in Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s Japan. Because he and his Cabinet admire the Nazis—out loud. And this weird reverence for both the Nazis and the World War II military dictatorship that ran Japan have been there from the start.

In the summer of 2013, Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Taro Aso, famous for his verbal gaffes declared in a speech to his political supporters, “Germany’s Weimar Constitution was changed into the Nazi Constitution before anyone knew. It was changed before anyone else noticed. Why don’t we learn from that method?”

Two of Abe’s Cabinet appointees were associated with Japan’s Nazi Party and several of his comrades wrote laudatory blurbs for a book called Hitler’s Election Strategy, published in 1994, and written by a member of Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). The book was banned after international criticism.

Comparisons with the Nazis are hard to brush off if your Cabinet members are looking up to them as role models.


http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/05/23/japan-shinzo-abes-government-has-a-thing-about-hitler-it-likes-him