Shinzo Abe was a world-renown revisionist who tried to turn Japan back into a far-right, ultra-racist country. Look, you guys are super smart with computers, but stop this absolute nonsense.
https://jacobin.com/2017/03/abe-nippon-kaigi-japan-far-right
I understand the provocation in the GP comment, but reacting in full flame mode, complete with insults, is exactly what the site guidelines ask you not to do.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: you've started a bunch of other flamewars in this thread too. That's basically arson, regardless of right you are or feel you are. Please stop now.
(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32023133.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32023133
> This is a terrible tragedy. Shinzo Abe seemed like a good man. I hope he pulls through, though reading the comments here makes it seem less likely.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Also, sometimes a story is so big that moderating it is effectively impossible—the more you bury it, the more it spawns new threads and gets upvoted. Trying to stand in the way just leads to it taking up more space and oxygen. In such cases, we've learned to allow one big discussion to absorb the interest, after which the community is usually ok with us marking reposts as dupes or follow-ups. People still need to follow the site guidelines in such a thread though.
This is NOT a serious take on Abe. Centrist and professional IR academics laugh at the narrative that he's a fascist.
A take that lives up to your handle.
Edit: example from (center)left leaning academic economist blogger that speaks specifically to the racist/fascist take you propagated here.
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-japan-that-abe-shinzo-...
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-53950704
Still, assassination is the wrong way to bring about change. As of now, he seems to still be alive; I hope he recovers, and I doubly hope that regardless, Japan is spared the chaos that sometimes follows assassinations.
I wonder if it was a pissed off Ryukyu native[1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nippon_Kaigi
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/7bd3ee/this-one-island-is-th...
Abe is in Nippon Kaigi. He is a nationalist. He pushed for revising the constitution to remove the purely self-defense nature of the SDF. This is not a popular idea in Japan. It is barely a popular idea in his party! The guy also liked the idea of picking a fight with China.
Now of course there are more intense people in Japan, but the guys a nationalist, and would push for unpopular ideas along that axis!
Is he a fascist? He supported more nationalist education reform that minimized wartime questions, was involved in a personal scandal with a far right school, pushed for more expansive police powers… I mean a lot of the stuff aligns. The label itself doesn’t matter, but you can look at the details and judge based on that.
Noah’s analysis is that he got more people into jobs and got the military to be bigger.
You might think that Abe's positions are correct or the norm, I don't believe that changes the judgement that he's a pretty heavy nationalist. Nationalists are willing to torpedo economic relationships with neighboring nations out of national pride. Loads of people are not nationalists!
Shinzo Abe in his autobiography Towards a Beautiful Country, 2006
Even here it tries to paint Japan trying to create it's own army as a bad thing when it is clearly in response to territorial aggressiveness from China.
> All of this drove South Korea-Japan relations to the brink, and then Abe’s most egregious misstep marched the relationship off the cliff.All of this drove South Korea-Japan relations to the brink, and then Abe’s most egregious misstep marched the relationship off the cliff. In order to settle the historical score, he weaponized the two countries’ trade relationship. In October 2018, South Korea’s Supreme Court issued the long-delayed opinion that Japanese corporations that used slave labor from Korea during World War II must pay reparations to surviving slave laborers. (The delay was in part because since 2013, Japan’s foreign ministry had been issuing barely disguised threats for the South Korean government to “respond appropriately” to the pending case, and the quasi-authoritarian Park Geun-hye government acquiesced and pressured the Supreme Court to delay the ruling in contravention of the most basic principles of separation of powers.) In response to the court’s opinion—which ordered the reparation of $89,000, a negligible amount for Japan’s largest corporations—Abe declared a trade war. The Abe administration announced export control against South Korea for three critical chemicals used in high-end display and semiconductor manufacturing, immediately after the G-20 summit in Osaka, Japan, in which the prime minister called for a free and fair trade. When confronted with the criticism that Japan was using trade for political purposes, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga (the front-runner to be the next prime minister) vaguely cited national security concerns as the reason for the export control, even as he dangled the idea that South Korea “did not offer a satisfactory solution over the issue of former workers.” So flimsy was the justification that some experts observing the issue noted that Japanese officials “haven’t provided any evidence” and “have not named companies or said how supplies may have been mismanaged.” Others went further, calling Tokyo’s excuse “duplicitous” and saying it was behaving “spuriously.”
What isn’t doable or is very tricky is things like Japan joining an allied nation in a fight in another place (for example it could not participate in Afghanistan or Iraq). Abe pushed for the idea of collective defense to allow for the govt to send in forces for those kinds of actions.
Japan can defend itself against China all it wants, but the current legal idea is it can’t actively participate in conflicts where it’s not directly involved. This is the thing Abe wanted to change, and is an unpopular idea in Japan.
Abe's been trying to re-militarize JP since his first term in mid 2000s, long before PRC military modernization began. You suggest he's precient, but history + his associations/controversies suggest a revisionist national hawk who loves his war criminals that understands Japan has territorial issues with everyone of her maritime neighbours and needs a proper non-pacifist military for "self-defense". No one in the west seems like to discuss that Japan, a loser of WW2 who should have her territories prescribed via treaty, has shown zero ability to address any of her linger disputes, including SCS tier EEZ drama (Okinotorishima). At end of day, it's within JP self interest to re-militarize, but let's not pretend Abe/LDP's questionable attachment to revisionsm aren't responsible for causing much of the maritime drama in the region.
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I was under the impression from friends who taught English there and other family members who worked there in various positions, this is how the country has always been - exclusionary to outsiders, racist and very intolerant to outsiders.
Was there a time (I lost track of the country after the first dot com bust in 2001) that the country wasn't like that? I'm genuinely curious.
edit: half of this conversation was nuked. wonderful flagging system. my comments were simply asking people to expand on their accusations.
Edit: there was a comment below stating that the GP was slandering Abe (which is false: slander means false and malicious statements. It cannot be labelled false if there is a pretense for the claim, and if you think that comment is malicious... That's a touch delicate, no?).
The comment also said GP was picking a 'classy time' to make such a remark, which is also perhaps not accurate. GP seems to be responding to OP, who stated known falsehoods. I'm that sense, it is not a 'poor time to say that' because it is a correction.
Abe din't do anything like that. Japan was always ultra-right and racist, and there is nothing wrong with it.
Certainly he was a controversial figure but nothing justifies this kind of violence.