Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has been bombarded with negative publicity and calls for his resignation after the eruption of major scandals involving bigotry and land sales to schools. Early last year it was discovered that the Finance Ministry, run by allies of Abe, sold a plot of land in Osaka to a private education-provider for about one tenth of its market value and reimbursed the company for most of the costs anyway to help with cleanup of the site; the issue here being that this would have been the Shinzo Abe Memorial School with Abe's wife Akei as honorary principal, one of the few proposed Shinto schools (a religion Abe practices) and one theoretically under the command of a man that circulated racist letters to parents of kindergartners using racial slurs in reference to Koreans and the Chinese, who it says have "wicked ideas" and contain the "spirit" of their homeland under the "face of the Japanese". This same kindergarten also had children recite WWII-era creeds phased out after the collapse of Japanese Imperialism (which fell for a reason). All of this racially and economically dicey business has led to Shinzo Abe's approval ratings plummeting into the mid-20s after mostly staying in the 60s since his reelection. This is only compounded upon recent allegations of sexual misconduct by a top-ranking Financial Ministry official. Can Abe survive this slew of scandals? Politically, it doesn't look like it.
This relates to the Watergate scandal of the Nixon Administration in which Nixon's cronies broke into the DNC to gain a possible edge information-wise in the upcoming campaign and then "Tricky Dick" himself actively obstructed justice in order to hide the crime. This also saw a precipitous fall in approval (one that would last decades and help cause a major political shift in America). The obvious connection here is that a head of state is facing serious public criticism and calls to step down; now, whether Abe actually bows to the pressure and resigns like Nixon remains to be seen.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/japanese-prime-minister-abe-embroiled-in-scandals-faces-calls-to-stand-down/2018/04/16/f4a8e054-4170-11e8-baaf-8b3c5a3da888_story.html?utm_term=.4045ed2f310c
As awful as these allegations are I doubt he will step down unless he faces charges-the final domino that threatens the collapse of his reputation. Until then, the poor people are probably stuck with him.
ReplyDeleteI also highly doubt that he will step down because he is such a big leader. He now has a bad reputation that will never go away
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