Abe Road

[unhappycamper]

http://fpif.org/abe-road/



Under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Japan’s chauvinistic surge has inflicted unmistakable damage on its national brand image.

Abe Road
By Nancy Snow, February 11, 2014.

It was a Thursday in Tokyo, the day after Christmas — what is known in some countries as Boxing Day. This time of year in late December is associated with the spreading of good cheer and happiness. Though this is not a strongly religious country and certainly not a Christian nation, the Japanese love an excuse to look at sparkling tree lights and become shopaholics as much as anyone.

But on this Boxing Day after Christmas, all that good cheer had dissipated. It gave way not so much to the end-of-year tradition of boxing up as to the feeling of being boxed in.

Boxing Day 2013 turned out to be the release date for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s new album, Abe Road. The album contains such singles as “Come Apart,” “He Came in through the War Shrine Gate,” and “Japan Sun King.” The music is a mixture of traditional folk tunes, war chants, and heavy metal with a testosterone-pumping bass. Critical response to Abe Road has been harsh, particularly from traditional Northeast Asia rivals like China and Korea, which recoil at Japan’s aggressive war past, but also from Japanophiles like me who oppose the country’s new mano y mano political posture.

It’s to be expected that regional rivals will take every ideological advantage of Japanese missteps, raising hackles about Japanese militarism. After all, China was the regional bogeyman of November with its announcement of an air defense identification system over the East China Sea, including disputed islands. But on Boxing Day, Abe stole China’s thunder with a visit to Tokyo’s controversial Yasukuni Shrine, which memorializes notorious war criminals alongside Japanese soldiers. Tokyo disingenuously painted the trip as just a domestic visit to pay homage to the war dead, but critics saw it otherwise.

[democratisphere]

1. Just what the world needs; more weapons, more military, more wars.

Humans as creatures are a mess.