JJ W comments

Apple's love for China's communists is deep, devoted and intense. Remember when they said China was the only country in the world capable of building its products?

Odd take. Businessmen don't "love communists," they love money and big markets. And the part about "capable" refers to having a developed enough supply chain that is also cheap.

Apple has begun shifting production more towards India, a country that is decidedly not communist.

Japan is definitely more vibrant anyway

Japan has effectively been a one-party state for the past 70 years

Does it come with a built in fax machine too?

Peace-worshipping Japan - as the only atomic victim - has an obligation to educate the world on the horrors of nuclear war.

They also have an obligation to educate themselves on the horrors of their own war crimes, instead of just playing the victim on the topic of WW2

Kishida said the war in Ukraine must end immediately and the international community should step up efforts to "work toward a world of cooperation, not division and confrontation."

Okay, that seems like a reasonable and commendable opinion. Not sure why this is news.

He urged the council to increase its permanent representation of Africa and Asia, including by adding countries such as India and Japan.

Aaaaand there it is, the ulterior motive. Well played Kishida lol

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, who heads the party, remains cautious about legalizing same-sex marriage and has called for further debate, saying doing so "could extensively change society as it concerns the lives of the people."

Yes, it would positively change the lives of gay people who are actually affected by it, not their nosy neighbors

Nothing in this world justifies to evaporate 2 cities full of innocent people..

Good old US as always romanticized the biggest war crime in history...

Tell me you don't know history without telling me you don't know history.

Even in WW2 this statement wouldn't be true by any moral or quantitative metric.

Resorting to xenophobia to eliminate potential rivals like Renho.

Yeah the stark contrast between the way Japanese right-wingers acted like Taiwan's "best friend" for geopolitical purposes (read: "enemy of my enemy") versus Japanese treating Renho (an actual Taiwanese person) with xenophobic suspicion when the stakes actually mattered was always interesting to me. Almost like a really conspicuous example of political honne and tatemae.

I feel like the standard of living in Japan is too comfortable (at least in terms of material distractions) for young people to vote for left-leaning parties, unlike the youth in most other developed countries.

Obviously killing is “wrong”, however cases like these are incredibly difficult…. For all we know she may have asked him to…

Fujiwara: "I really regret that I killed Teruko without consulting her"

(according to the Mainichi report)

That should put that theory to rest, dude's a selfish murderer

Japanese news said that the idea of sending her to a facility was not

acceptable to him, he was the one who did everything for her for 40 long

years and the connection they had and the trust she had for him would be

replaceable.

Little good that "trust" did for her seeing how he betrayed her in the end and took her life without her consent

The 40 years of caretaking doesn't mitigate the crime it makes the betrayal way worse

Imagine drowning without being able to move your legs, that's excruciatingly painful. Pretty sure that was not her "method of choice" even if she were secretly suicidal

Drowning your disabled wife who can't swim seems cruelly efficient and seven years for murder is too lenient.

"I thought of killing myself too" sounds like a Hail Mary attempt to euphemize the murder as a murder-suicide attempt that (quite conveniently) ended up working out for him alone.

This is good in that Ryukyu won’t turn into a battlefield. China will foster Ryukyu in the same way Japan fosters Taiwan relations.

Yep, there's not much wiggle room for Japan to lecture China about Taiwan given their own history of colonization and annexation. Even if you squint and ignore the current existence of a Ryukyu independence movement, the recognition that Okinawa was actually Japan's first colony (and not Taiwan) is not a foreign idea even among mainland Japanese academics.

I would have expected way more comments here to be in support of the American right and against woke ideology.

For some reason people here are oddly liberal on US issues and yet staunchly conservative on Japanese issues.

Tokyu Kabukicho Tower, the country's first skyscraper designed by a woman

"Oh neat that's a cool looking building, I wonder when it was built"

[Opened 2023]

"Wait...first as in the first EVER?"

Freedom RulezToday 08:22 am JST

What a travesty it will be to have Communist China censorship in anime just like we have Communist China's censorship in Hollywood movies. Noone will hear about Communist China's current genocide, Noone will hear about Communist China's forced organ harvesting on a massive scale.

Lol just like Japanese anime censors any mention of their WW2 atrocities?

No one will hear about Unit 731 or the Nanjing Massacre in an anime because they'll just take it off the air or heavily censor it due to right-wing death threats.

The headlines that once fretted about 'remilitiarization' or the 'hawkish' ruling party have been replaced with more level-headed analyses.

I mean, no need to put "remilitarization" or "hawkish" in quotes, those are indisputably accurate descriptions of the LDP's general tendencies.

Along with "revisionist," which wasn't mentioned but makes the prospect of a remilitarized Japan at minimum somewhat more concerning than, say, an inarguably contrite and history-conscious Germany with an army.

Japan should see this as an opportunity to mitigate the labor crisis and population decline.

I dunno, Japan has been demonstrably averse to long-term, mass immigration. Especially if it means importing more people from so-called adversarial Asian countries like South Korea and China.

Pretty sure the authorities would rather develop caretaker robots than deal with "Zainichi trouble" and "cultural infiltration."

Sounds more like buyer's remorse after Japan bit off more than it could chew by starting wars in China and Southeast Asia.

Still doesn't contradict the mainstream "narrative" (read: historical fact) about how they were unequivocally the aggressors in WW2, but of course the right-wing nationalists and net uyoku will jump on this tidbit of "evidence" to claim that poor Japan did nothing wrong and were only trying to liberate Asia from Western colonialism.

"So pathetic, why am I taking advice from...toilet paper?"

"Move forward" is just tatemae-speak for "don't mind us while we ignore and deny the past."

While they're at it they should probably also explain their links to Nippon Kaigi as well.

Curious to see why Nippon Kaigi hasn't jumped at the opportunity to foot the bill. The man was, after all, a consummate patriot in their eyes: he did more to push Japan rightwards towards his (nationalist and revisionist) vision of a "beautiful" country.

OssanAmericaToday  01:57 pm JST

Historical revisionism in Japan is minimal.

LMAO you can't be serious, your comment itself is ignorant of reality. In both comparative and absolute terms Japan is way up there.

Revisionism in Japan, and apathy to its shameless expression, is baked into national politics and history education and even pop culture on a pervasive scale. In no other first world democratic country would a politician or business leader feel so comfortable in making statements outright denying historical atrocities or denigrating the victims, with the confidence that they will probably not receive meaningful blowback or lose customers for inflammatory remarks that anywhere else would be considered terrible political/business sense.

Even Trump wasn't dumb enough to suggest that slavery and the atomic bombings didn't happen, because thankfully the majority of Americans are historically aware and care enough not to provide shelter for historical revisionists either through explicit support or silence.

Translation: Kishida is relieved that Japanese politicians and public figures can continue making revisionist statements about Japanese-Korean history without blowback.

For such an old society Japan is unbelievably ageist.

"Ageism" has nothing to do with flouting rules and thinking you're entitled to date women 10+ years younger than you. In fact you could argue he's the one being ageist because he won't date senior citizens lol

OssanAmericaJan. 25  07:34 pm JST

And who would that be?

Because Nobusuke KIshi was never charged, tried or convicted as a War Criminal.

That doesn't mean he didn't commit war crimes. Otherwise you could inarguably claim that Truman wasn't a war criminal for dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki because he was never charged, tried, or convicted.

On the same topic of war crimes and Kishi, the only reason they let Kishi go was politics, same reason they gave amnesty to the Unit 731 members. MacArthur rehabilitated the right-wing because he wanted postwar Japan to be a bulwark against communism in Asia.

Gotta say, "conservative grandfather" is a pretty generous euphemism for "war criminal."

If Japan's problems with history education (regarding the whitewashing of events involving China) are a "domestic issue" that China has no say in, then Japan certainly has no say in China's issues concerning HK and Xinjiang which Japan isn't even involved with.

Also their "concern" over HK/Xinjiang isn't humanitarian in the least, it's more of an anti-China "enemy of my enemy is my friend" deal, namely a friend being any region that's at odds with and likely to destabilize a regional competitor like China. It the motivations of these right-wingers were actually altruistic then they would spend more time bringing attention to peoples oppressed by other countries. But even historically that's never really been the case.

What's kind of hilarious about the right wing's insistence on these limitations to preserve the purity and sanctity of the imperial line is that Akihito already admitted years ago that the imperial family has Korean blood, so at this point they're basically just putting a band-aid on a bullet wound.