What does ‘liberal’ mean in Japan’s politics?

[yuiyoshida]

The Yomiuri Shimbun

(Riberaru= リベラル)

When the Liberal Democratic Party, under the leadership of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, won the House of Councillors election in July — the party’s fourth straight national election victory — it was said to represent “the decline of the liberals.” The word liberal is now being bandied about a great deal ahead of the upcoming presidential election of the Democratic Party in September. However, there is a lot of vagueness in the way the word is used and how it is understood. What exactly does liberal mean? For an answer to that question, we spoke with Tatsuo Inoue, a self-professed liberal, and with Keishi Saeki, a well-known conservative advocate.


Constitution defenders betray true meaning
Tatsuo Inoue / Professor at the University of Tokyo

With the collapse of the Cold-War structure and the ebbing of socialist movements, words like “reformist” and “left-wing” fell out of use in Japan. Instead, the label that came to be applied to anticonservatives was “liberal.” But this was merely a change of name by the reformists, not liberalism properly speaking.

In the ideological context of postwar Japan, liberalism was not properly accepted. It got beaten up on by both the left and the right. The left condemned liberalism as constituting an apologetic justification of capitalism, saying that even tempering it with welfare-state policies, it still served merely to camouflage class domination by the capitalists.

The right, meanwhile, denounced liberalism because, despite its attachment to things like individualism, universal values and the separation of religion and state, it was a rootless belief that ignores tradition.

continues..
http://the-japan-news.com/news/article/0003193525