It’s been a decade since I was in Nihon and I’ve not kept up with the place the way I once did, but I’ve been reading periodically about laws restricting the press. This seemed to be something Abe was interested in when he became PM in 2006 but the LDP went through a bit of turbulence in the years that followed IIRC. Looks like he got his wish.
Japan has always had an “us against the world” mentality – possibly since antiquity or at least since the Edo era, depending on when you consider the beginning of Japanese history. Japan is the victim of WWII, not the perpetrator of atrocities. They don’t speak of apologies but of regrets - regrets of taking on conflicts they were unable to finish.
Yes, Abe has been on a mission to install his lackeys into key media and other government/quasi-government positions. The current head of NHK (national news) is a toady who has publicly stated that he will not allow criticism of the Abe government.
It has no merit to deny that the IJA committed atrocities at Nanking. It’s a matter of the scale, as historical fact, and whether the uncertainty of the scale is enough to think differently about the incident than ‘300,000’, or not.
Anyone can read the wiki article on Nanking numbers:
A wide range of numbers, and a widely varying % of total deaths accounted for by the killing of Chinese military prisoners.
But what’s most different and difficult compared to Holocaust scholarship is that so much of both the good and deliberately bad scholarship on Nanking (in both directions actually as to numbers) is by Japanese. Hardly any is from China, and relatively little directly from elsewhere. It’s as if there was a number for victims of the Holocaust from immediate postwar war crimes investigations, pretty much one sided from victim’s POV, and it was politically/socially unacceptable to re-examine, or researchers just weren’t that interested, anywhere but Germany; and later findings included those by German pro Nazi and Communist pseudo-historians, but also real historians. In fact Holocaust scholarship has broadened and deepened greatly over the decades with continuing consensus about basic scale, not the case with Nanking.
When her party doesn’t get elected into power (and, yes, that’s happened before), then she won’t be in the cabinet. Yes, the bureaucrats run things, but they’re not the ones making the stupid commentary right now; it’s this particular minister of defense.
Abe’s support matters while Abe is PM. When their party is not the ruling party nor part of the ruling coalition, then the only way she’ll be in the cabinet is if the other party’s leader selects her. Seeing as she’s not in their party, that’s not quite likely.
Is it fair to say that while the Germans have a guy to blame WWII on, a guy detested throughout the world, the Japanese have no single person they can blame?
Well, the Germans (including some of my cousins over there) very well may want to believe they can blame WWII on just one man, but the fact remains that he couldn’t’ve done it on his own. When it comes to Japan, a number of people consider Hirohito as the main culprit, others consider Tojo the main culprit, and others blame the army leadership as a group. Personally, I think Hirohito deserves a lot of blame, but so do many others, both military and civilian, at the time.
That’s my point, they can believe that Germans are/were regular folks, it was that one bad guy who caused the whole thing. The Japanese, on the other hand, don’t have a fall guy; everyone has to share the blame.
To be fair, “it was all Hitler” is a pretty dysfunctional approach to the history of that period, or the history of contemporary Germany in general. Besides, the Japanese have their own Big Bads - Tojo, Hirota, Itagaki, Doihara…