Prime Minister Abe Shinzo Intends to Step Down | Hacker News Reader

Prime Minister Abe Shinzo Intends to Step Down

www3.nhk.or.jp

68 pointsbenrbray73 comments

More information:

[1] Japan Times, "How Possible Successors Stack up if Abe Resigns" (https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/08/24/national/politi...)

[2] Japan Times, "Abe to Resign due to Health Concerns, NHK Reports" (https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/08/28/national/politi...)

I have my disagreements with Abe, but it’s hard not to admire someone who walks in with bold ideas and tries for as long as he did to push society in a different direction.

The morass would have done many in much sooner. Wishing Mr. Abe a swift recovery.

There's a pro Abe narrative in the west I do not understand.

It's a one party system, and as all one party systems it's incredibly corrupt. Under his tenure poor people became poorer, his friends became richer, and press freedoms got crushed into the earth. What on earth did he do or attempt to do that was admirable?

The Liberal Democratic Party (Abe's party) has received monetary, opposition intelligence, and propaganda support from the US since it's inception:

https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/09/world/cia-spent-millions-...

Again, I have disagreements with him.

But Japan has been in a bad place for decades. Abenomics, though it has not achieved the results it was aiming for, was an attempt. Trying to restore Japan’s standing army is another bold attempt. Bringing about big changes is something to be admired.

He’s done quite a bit of work on getting women into the workforce and into leadership positions with not terrible results for such a difficult problem.

This narrative is touted in the western press, but has little basis in reality. In real terms, women were only allowed into low wage, low rank, and part time or contract work to juke labor force participation stats. Gender parity is worse than it was 14 years ago:

>This year, the World Economic Forum ranked Japan 121st out of 153 countries on gender parity, down 11 places from the year before and 41 places from 2006. Its gender pay gap of 23.5 percent is the highest among G-7 countries and the second highest in the OECD, behind only South Korea. And while the share of women in the labor force has grown to more than 70 percent, higher than in the United States or the European Union, most female workers in Japan have part-time or contract jobs, which are more vulnerable during economic crises. Of the 970,000 irregular jobs that were lost in April due to the coronavirus pandemic, 710,000 were held by women.

https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/trend-lines/28972/for-ja...

It's hard to say without more data. Are more women who have never been in the workforce, or out of it for a very long time, now coming back in at lower positions and thus bringing the stat down, but there's a net benefit as those women are now there, climbing the ladder slowly but surely?

Or it can be as you say, and that they are getting glass ceiling.

We will see what the results are but - https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Business-trends/Japanese-co... is a goal at least, publicly stated. The US hasn't had such a goal by any administration.

I’m not sure if you read the article I linked, but the 30% of executives is not a new goal but a revision by ten years of a failed target set by Abe when he first took office. It’s not a serious measure, but something used to distract from the widening inequality and growing poverty measures in Japan.

Japanese households needing two wage earners to survive is increasingly becoming a reality, but is a violation of what the LDP has promised would be delivered through its conservativism. Abe’s pivot to “womenomics” was a little more than a PR maneuver to distract from the worsening material conditions that the LDP’s corrupt, failed leadership have wrought, while preserving the underlying, extreme sexism of the country.

Rare politician;

If I can’t discharge my responsibility to the people of this country with confidence, then I judge I should not continue as prime minister https://archive.vn/KaCoE

He is the longest serving Prime Minister in the history of Japan just shy of 8 years. Before COVID-19 he was under constant attack for a school funding scandal, manipulating a cherry blossom party guest list hosted by the government, and his mishandling of COVID-19. He never got to revise the Japanese Constitution to reinstate a standing military force and all his economic gains were cancelled by COVID-19. I don't know how history will judge Abe but he did better than most.

I wish I understood the origin of all the pro-Abe PR narratives in the US. In Japan, he’s immensely unpopular and emblematic of the country’s corrupt, one-party democracy.

His supposed “revitalization” of the Japanese economy has done little more than further impoverish average people, so he can hand out tax benefits to the wealthy and his cronies. He’s dismantled press freedom in a way that other politicians on the far right only dream of, having fired or demoted several prominent journalists who voiced (by Western standards) mild criticism of him.

The origin seems pretty obvious to me — Abe is part of the old guard, a plutocrat and moral conservative, like his propagandist supporters in the US media. Doesn't take any squinting to see their interests align

Yes, it was inaccurate for me to question the origin. I should've said its surprising to me that otherwise educated people still fall for these narratives.

Blind idolization of Japan runs deeper than you might expect, especially in communities like the one we’re typing on.

When I lived there, I could never find anyone who liked him... but then again as a society it’s not quite like the west where political engagement is high.

He seemed to have had this issue back in 2007, when he resigned from the Prime Ministership for the first time. At soon-to-be 66 he's not older than Trump, I wonder if he will make a third comeback.

If he doesn't, I wonder how future generations will look upon Abenomics. Reuters is already claiming it failed to deliver [1], but it takes ages to understand the full impact of economic changes.

1: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-economy-abenomics-a...

Was it his decision to open Japan up? I've seen some graphs and they've had more tourists in the past 10 years than they've had in many decades, combined, before.

In previous decades, there weren't as many tourists from China.

Japan is rather far away from most of the rest of the developed world, so its international tourism industry relies heavily on a handful of neighboring countries. China, Korea, and Taiwan make up 2/3 of all foreign tourists who visit Japan, and almost 3/4 if you count Hong Kong as well [1][2]. The increase in the total number of tourists in the 2010s is more a reflection of how well Japan's neighbors have been doing as it is of Japan's objective attractiveness as a destination.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourism_in_Japan#Statistics

[2] China's share was probably even larger in 2019, as diplomatic disputes with South Korea resulted in a ~60% drop in the number of Korean tourists to Japan in the second half of 2019. This year, of course, the pandemic screwed up everything.

>In previous decades, there weren't as many tourists from China.

This. Billion+ people country with a growing middle class that's almost within day-trip distance is gonna result in a hell of a lot more tourists.

He will be missed.

Now who will open the Olympic Games?

isn’t his name Shinzo Abe?

In Japan, the surname comes first. Both orders are found in English; surname last has been more common. I understand it is becoming more common to stop the reversal, in equivalent fashion as Xi Jinping who has his name in the Chinese order rather than the English order even in English.

Also Kim JongUn and Lee Hsien Long + Lee Kwan Yew

Yes, but apparently you put the family name first in Japan.

In Japan, the convention is to write the family name first and the given name second.

https://www.npr.org/2019/05/22/725753561/shinzo-abe-or-abe-s...

Most languages of East Asia have a Surname First Name order (even with limits to how many syllables the family name can have). So Mr. Shinzo’s first name is Abe, written as Shinzo Abe. Same with Korean’s Kim, whose first names are Jong Un or let’s say Vietnamese’s Ho Chi Min, whose surname was Ho. Sun Yat-sen (last name Sun), Taiwan’s Tsai Ing-wen (surname Tsai), Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew (Lee family) etc etc. You get the idea.

Nitpick: the name is Ho Chi Minh, not Min.

That's the kind of thing I just assume a mobile keyboard autocorrected. It's a forum, not a publication. Armchair editors need not apply.

Min/Max... That's exactly what happened. The beauties of typing this on an iPad ;)

You could have stopped after the first sentence.

Your assumption is fair, and feedback is generally welcomed, but this kind of opinion is not helpful or solicited. Some people may not know the correct spelling.

I think you got this backward, Abe is his family name. Er, depends on what you call his "first name" lol.

First- and sur- are part of the problem here. People tend to talk about given and family names to distinguish name semantics from name order.

In Japanese, people use the "FamilyName GivenName" order. Up until recently people generally used the "GivenName FamilyName" order when speaking English. Apparently this practice was adopted more than 100 years ago to be more western. Recently, the Japanese government decided that "FamilyName GivenName" was going to be the new standard when writing Japanese names in Roman letters[1]. Some people follow this and some people don't.

I did a quick ask around the office asking which order people would use when introducing themselves to someone from abroad. About half said "FamilyName GivenName", the other half said "GivenName FamilyName". So basically, if you meet someone from Japan the most straightforward thing to do is ask what they would prefer to be called.

[1]https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/09/06/national/japane...

What is fun is when you are a foreigner and Japanese colleagues earnestly think that they should call you "Jack-san" because it comes first in English. It's like "Mister Jack"! For a native English speaker it would be used jokingly/friendly, but Japanese people do it seriously. This is not being helped by these television programs with foreign celebrities (living in Japan) exclusively called by their nickname.

Most style guides suggest using the "GivenName FamilyName" order for foreigner names even when speaking in Japanese. You can see this reflected in most forms of writing.

I don't think Japanese people are in any state of confusion when they say Jack-san. Japanese people simply feel that dropping "san" would be rude and they have always been taught to refer to westerners by their given names. "san" doesn't exactly neatly map onto Mr either. Saying things like "driver-san" or "foreigner-san" is perfectly normal.

How rude is it to not use "san"? I've seen a client blow up over not having san attached to their name in an English email. Manners like this are quite deeply engrained: try not saying "thank you" the next time someone hands you something, it feels deeply wrong. It's hard to blame Japanese people for a similar adherence to manners.

Well, if you call anybody Yoshifumi-san (given that Yoshifumi is their given name), he would be very upset.

They make it clear that whenever you use their given name you should NOT add "san" to it.

So that's kind of weird that they do it for foreigners.

Yes they add "-san" to pretty much anything, but their given name is the one notable exception.

I think that there are ancient roots of this, for example in the Heian era the fact to be in relationship with a girl was synonymous to know her given name, and use it to call her before the date ("yobai"). The given name in Japan is something very personal and private, and this would explain why it seems incongruous to them when it is used with "-san".

Oh, I didn't make things clear. The email was completely written in English. I think there has to be a little cross-cultural understanding both ways in these situations.

Ah, my bad, I was speaking about when conversing completely in Japanese. Maybe they react differently / have different expectations when they are writing / speaking English.

From my experience, when speaking in Japanese, they are quite strict (if you are not a customer of course, in this case they would hide their feeling) about not adding "-san" to their given name, when they allow you to use the bare given name.

In the story you relate, in this email in English, was it the given name that was used, or the family name?

Now he wants to be known as ABE Shinzo as of this year.

Capitalizing the family name first is recommended here: https://www.languagemagazine.com/2020/01/23/japan-reverses-w...

I admit, it is confusing even for a Japanese speaker which one to me which is his family name or if I already need to flip the order.

The context is that too many people accidentally address him by his first name which is considered a bit embarrassing for polite society.

Not sure what to think of that. Of course it’s annoying to have your disease recur, but it does feel like he’s just up and leaving when things aren’t looking good.

You just can't falsify a medical diagnosis and would you rather have a Prime Minister leading the country despite deteriorating health? Japan's COVID-19 situation is still way better than most countries. Whether it will hold is anyone's guess but he's not fit enough to make big decisions and at some point Japan might need another lock down.

I will say that I don't trust the LDP to rise above their internal bickering and backroom politics to choose someone capable of handling this pandemic but that is neither here nor there. We will find out soon.

There really isn't any stand out for LDP leadership post Abe and that's something that deeply concerns me.

I think Japan shows that political leadership, of all factors, has minimal impact on COVID-19 outcome. The Japanese government did almost nothing and got away with it.

They didn't have to, because much of their population already follows "COVID-safe" practices. A large fraction wears facemasks in public and especially on public transport. They bow instead of shaking hands. They don't kiss acquaintances on the face, unlike say the custom in parts of the middle east. They're very hygienic, even taking their shoes off when entering a home. Food workers wear masks and gloves. So do taxi and bus drivers. Etc, etc...

A full lockdown on top of this would have unnecessarily harmed their economy with little medical benefit.

so many mis-conceptions.

Japanese don't all wear masks. They all had experience wearing them but it wasn't common to see more than 5% of people wearing them at any one time until Covid

Japan is not remotely hygienic. Most hospitals and doctor's offices would be shut down by the health inspectors in the USA. I've seen all kinds of disgustingly dirty beds, cabinets, shelves, tables, and equipment in my 14 years here. Most restaurants as well. It was only covid that finally got them to cover food items at bakeries and buffets. It's easy to lose your appetite when you see kids sneezing on all the food.

And for the last 2/2.5 months the country has seemed mostly not caring about Covid. People are partying at bars, restaurants, and coffee shops and their masks are off. Clubs are even open.

Something else must explain why Covid hasn't been bigger here but it is not hygiene

> Most restaurants as well

You should check UK out then. They love to handle food and money at the same time with their bare hands.

Japanese don't all wear masks but it's the cultural norm that if you feel bad you wear a mask. I would think that custom would help stop the spread.

It's not necessary that everyone wear masks, only the people that have COVID.

Fair enough, but most cases of COVID are largely asymptomatic and the infectiousness has its peak right before symptom onset.

Yeah, and ever since that became clear everyone has been wearing a mask pretty much all the time.

They might be sloppy about it and hang it halfway down their nose, but they still won’t be seen without one.

Until summer anyway, now it’s just too hot, but the heatstroke count is still way up due to people wearing masks.

I agree with this entirely. I've been to Japan and can confirm it isn't noticeably more clean than most rich cities and certainly not as clean as Singapore (for example)

I've dug into this in some depth and there is no convincing explanation. Even "luck" (which is a much underestimated factor in initial breakout dynamics) doesn't seem to explain it - unless they are persistently lucky somehow.

There's something else going on and no one really knows what it is. There is plenty of speculation, but nothing that is even close to an accepted explanation.

I happened to see a chart showing that among wealthy countries, the US is at the top for obesity and Japan is at the bottom. Just a correlated random fact that nobody knows the cause of either. Maybe something about fish consumption?

There are huge numbers of significant demographic differences between Japan and the US.

It's true that obesity is a factor in COVID death dates (as it is for most things) but there are plenty of places with lower levels of obesity with significantly higher death rates. Singapore and South Korea are better comparisons here and the death rate is significantly higher.

As for fish consumption - it's difficult to think of a reason why that would be significant for a respiritory disease like COVID. It wasn't for SARS.

I mean perhaps seafood is linked to less obesity.

> Something else must explain why Covid hasn't been bigger here but it is not hygiene

For one, Japanese are significantly healthier on average, including many of the risk factors for COVID-19. Even a slight difference in average can make a huge difference at the tail ends, that is the number of people that actually die, as well as the people that develop no symptoms whatsoever.

I've spent an accumulated 3 months in Japan over the last three years, and I have eyes, so please don't gaslight me.

Their general use of masks and gloves before the pandemic in high density urban areas is instantly noticeable. It's not 5%, it is closer to 50%.

I saw punks. Literal goth punks, with the boots and the tats and the piercings and the black clothes and the mohawks wear masks.

Before the pandemic. Not during. Before.

In America you have Karens screaming in the face of shop attendants about their "rights" and how they have a "medical condition" that prevents them wearing a mask.

So, yeah. I don't think it's a mystery that Japan did better than the US.

You're not being gaslit, you're getting an account from another person that may be different from what you experienced.

If you look at footage from before COVID-19, I'd say that mask usage in general was much closer to 5% than 50%:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpXcG9Nfvos

> I saw punks. Literal goth punks, with the boots and the tats and the piercings and the black clothes and the mohawks wear masks.

Dressing like that doesn't mean they're anti-social or edgy. It's just fashion.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxvLyY2eBwM

Yeah, this post sounds fake and wrong and should be rejected. Japan is most likely the most hygienic country on earth (okay, Singapore may beat them). Sure you can find some backwater somewhere in Japan with worse hygiene than the USA, but the overwhelming majority of that nation has levels of hygiene which make even the cleanest parts of America look like a pig pen.

Lived in Singapore and it’s closer to the US in terms of cleanliness.

Are you serious about Singapore being hygienic? Ever been to hawker stands in Singapore? Ever visit Little India on a Sunday? Ever walk though the food section of Mustafas? Especially the eggs isle? And yes I know they are inspected.

These are all great post hoc arguments, but we could equally well list factors that point the other way. They have very dense cities and packed public transport. They have a culture of presenteeism that discourages sick leave and working from home. They have one of the most elderly-heavy populations in the world. Etc...

Regardless, it does seem like GP's point is correct. The political leadership isn't necessarily what makes a difference: it's all of the other factors.

> You just can't falsify a medical diagnosis and would you rather have a Prime Minister leading the country despite deteriorating health?

No, you are totally right. I never said it was rational :) My guess is the disease is playing up again now due to the stress he’s under.

> There really isn't any stand out for LDP leadership post Abe and that's something that deeply concerns me.

Yeah, I happen to agree with that, which might be what makes me so uncomfortable with him leaving.

He might not have been great, but things have unarguably been stable.

You can criticize Abe for a lot of things, but up and leaving is not one of them. He has tirelessly worked year after year, trying to achieve a vision he has for Japan. This is not his first time leaving office—last time was also due to a medical condition, and he returned when treatment became available. Most people would not have returned in the manner he did.

The man is resolute and resilient.

Not surprising. Haven't seen much if anything of him in the media since he announced Japan's complete victory over Covid 19 right before things started reopening.

Just to clarify, that its' definitely not been a complete victory.

More like a nice display of "selective testing" so the numbers always look acceptable.

https://toyokeizai.net/sp/visual/tko/covid19/en.html Publicly available test results show active cases slowly surge higher than the point when they started shutting down. The numbers hardly look acceptable.

If Japan didn't have the pandemic under control, would there not be a surge of deaths, particularly in the vulnerable age groups? https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/05/12/national/tokyo-...

The death rate has a lot to do with who gets infected, elderly in Japan tend to be far healthier and in better care.

Another possibility is that those deaths are simply not counted. Japan did notoriously little testing in the beginning. If a couple of 90 year olds die a bit sooner, few would suspect foul play.

I don't believe this statement is accurate, there are a lot of elderly who aren't in great shape in good care also.

I think what is accurate is that there is a lot of shame in Japanese society and there are many accounts of even healthcare workers being ostracized and bullied for catching it.

What I believe is more accurate is that it's swept under the rug in Japan more than other countries.

If someone elderly in a family dies from Covid19, it's easier to not bother requesting a test so you don't have to deal with the shame of having it in your family if it comes back positive.

I'm not that against the lenient testing strategy, just don't think it's an accurate depiction of what's going on in Japan.I do think it's having a negative impact economically because people never truly feel safe as they don't understand the risks well enough to enjoy themselves.

I was being sarcastic; should not have assumed that would have been understood.

Certainly room for improvement regarding Japan's Covid's management strategy, but I live in the US so shouldn't really throw stones from my glass house.

Japan just passed the peak of the second wave.

It seems like the situation is slowly improving, and is on the good slope, but the epidemic is very much still alive.

I always look at the "要入院" (people needing hospitalization) curve on the graph, rather than the "新規" (new cases) curve, because it cannot be manipulated as easily by changes in testing policies. I use the following site:

https://newsdigest.jp/pages/coronavirus/

I appreciate the enthusiasm, but look at how few tests are being done in Tokyo though?

https://stopcovid19.metro.tokyo.lg.jp/en/

It's tiny, Tokyo, often not even breaking 4000 in a city of 14 million.

Not to mention it's difficult to get tested without meeting certain _criteria_ or pay 30000Y. I know people in Aus and the US countries who have been tested multiple times by now for free.

The testing is hopeless, the results are tallied up by faxes sent around from different wards in Tokyo and are delayed by a few days. Really, it's a pretty sad state of affairs.

I think it's nice that whatever numbers Japan is presenting are on the down trend, but the narrative is also tightly controlled no one knows what to really believe.

I hate too the testing policy in Japan.

But this policy alone cannot explain a supposed anomaly in the count of "requiring hospitalization" covid patients. That's because I assume that the persons with covid with a health state that requires hospitalization will always be tested.

What do you think would be a plausible bias? Maybe less aggravating factors among infected Japanese people?

I do think it's likely that mostly younger people make up the majority of new cases, that's probably a large part of it.

Then many young people seem to wear masks in public (at work etc) so they just don't easily spread it to elderly? Who knows...

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