The Shocking Silence of Japan’s Mainstream Media After a Man Set Himself on Fire to Protest the Decision to Overturn the Pacifist Postwar Order

by Jeff Kingston

Jeff Kingston is the Director of Asian Studies, Temple University Japan and an Asia-Pacific Journal editor. He is the editor of Natural Disaster and Nuclear Crisis in Japan: Response and Recovery after Japan’s 3/11, Routledge 2012 and the author of Contemporary Japan. (2nd edition), London: Wiley 2013.

July 1, 2014, the sixtieth anniversary of the establishment of the SDF, will go down in history as a watershed in Japan’s postwar history, a 21st century day of infamy when Abe hijacked democracy by renouncing Article 9 and the nation’s pacifist postwar order in an unscrupulous manner, achieving by fiat what he didn’t dare try through established constitutional procedures. Apparently Abe fears the people as much as they fear him.

Read entire article at The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus