Right now Japan is going through a period of introspection (albeit mostly in a political context) in relation to what kind of society it wishes to be and how it might retain something of its labour strength in the face of dwindling population and productivity statistics. On Tuesday, debate began in earnest in the Lower House on proposed changes to immigration laws to expand the range of professions allowable in order to increase the number of foreign workers permitted to work in Japan.  Up until now, most professions involving foreign workers have been limited to those at the higher end of the income curve, most notably lawyers, traders, university professors and the like, with a separate program for foreign ‘students’ in industries that are more reliant on physical labour, notably fishing and farming (this program has, however, been somewhat controversial, for while it is ostensibly about teaching foreign students to acquire agriculture and technical skills, it has often been used as a simple means of finding staff without regard for adequate wages or good working conditions).  

Debate this week has mostly focused on the number of workers that will be allowed into the country. Under the proposal put forward by the government, the range of permitted professions will expand to 14 in number, with a first intake of between 3,300 to 4,700 workers starting in April 2019. By 2023 the government predicts that between 260,000 to 340,000 foreign workers will have been employed in Japan’s domestic industries. The problem here, however, is that according to the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, Japan will have a shortfall in workers of around 1,300,000 to 1, 350,000 by 2023. The Ministry of Justice initially anticipated that Japan would need to admit 40,000 workers in the first year of the new program, which would then expand to 250,000, although these figures were never made public.

Hence the disparity in numbers will need to be met either by increasing the intake of foreign workers or changing regulations governing employment in Japan.  Opposition parties in Japan are demanding that the government reveal how it intends to overcome the worker gap, particularly if it wants to boost worker numbers. The government itself has said that it is examining the prospect of a greater intake, although details of its policy have yet to be made public.  

The issue of foreign labour in Japan is a contentious one for a number of reasons. Despite Japan benefiting from large influxes of immigrants from South America from the 1960s onwards, immigrants who were by and large of Japanese ancestry with some form of tangible link to the country, these immigrants still experienced difficulty in integrating with Japanese society. Japan, unlike other developed countries, does not have programs in place to deal with large scale immigration, and there aren’t enough NGOs available to cope with the needs of diverse immigrant communities. Japanese society itself is not in favour of an expanded immigration regime (although somewhat paradoxically a majority of Japanese also believe that immigrants help society by contributing their labour and skills).

Japan is coming to this issue somewhat late, given that declining productivity and the drop in the domestic working age population has been debated at length for over a decade. It is also competing against other countries around the region and world who have large scale immigration programs targeting manual labourers from developing countries, with some of these offering better working conditions and wages than can be found in Japan. 

It is to the credit of PM Abe that he has been at the forefront of this initiative, and that he is using his renewed authority within the LDP to push for increased immigration. This policy, which is primarily aimed at insuring against any sharp downturn in Japan’s productivity over the long term, could have added benefits for Japan’s renewed focus on regional leadership as well.  Since a majority of workers will be drawn from developing nations in the region, their acceptance will provide evidence of Japan’s desire to contribute to the well-being and technical progress of the region as a whole. While many challenges lie ahead, not least of which is getting a majority of Japanese society to accept the presence of larger numbers of foreign labourers in their midst, it opens the door to a potential resolution of Japan’s labour woes and a greater integration of Japan into the global labour market.   

In a long litany of posts in which I apologise for the lack of updates, this won’t be one of them. I’ve been busy. And I’ve been trying to juggle various responsibilities while thinking of a subject about which to write. Today, amidst news of the attempts by Tokyo Medical University to wind back the clock and reduce the number of women entering the university by doctoring (no pun intended) their entrance scores, this gem of a story came to my attention during the week and deserves a mention on this blog.

As most readers would know, Japan is scheduled to host the Olympics in two years’ time. While this fact itself has been reported almost to death, what has not received quite as much exposure has been articles talking of cost blowouts, potential fatalities from running a marathon in the middle of Japan’s summer, and the churn in ministers responsible for keeping the Olympic schedule on track. After the recent LDP leadership election and subsequent reshuffle in responsibilities, it has fallen upon the rather obscure figure of Sakurada Yoshitaka to assume the mantle of minister responsible for this logistical and PR behemoth.

On Monday Sakurada did not exactly cover himself in glory when he fronted the Upper House Budget Committee to answer questions about his portfolio.  The questions were, admittedly, pretty straight-forward; namely what was the vision for the Olympics, what were the key concepts involved in the Olympics, and how much were the Olympics likely to cost. The problem was that Sakurada was not able to answer these questions straight away, and on a few occasions proceedings had to be brought to a halt as Sakurada received some quick briefings on his portfolio by senior bureaucrats. On the following day, Sakurada fronted the media to explain his performance, claiming that because the opposition had failed to provide the government will a list of its questions beforehand (a unique aspect of the Diet system much commented on by other countries where parliamentary debate is less scripted) he had been unable to provide answers in a more ‘timely’ manner (the opposition claim that they did inform Sakurada’s staff ahead of time, which the LDP itself confirmed on Wednesday).

The problem was then exacerbated on Friday when Sakurada once again fronted the media, this time to withdraw his comments made to the Committee, saying that they were “somewhat different to the truth”, but against reiterating his claim that “if only the opposition had provided detailed questions ahead of time, then I could answer them in full”. 

Naturally the opposition parties have been zeroing in on this performance, for the absence of anything else with which to berate PM Abe they have to take what is available.  Questions were raised about Sakurada’s suitability to serve in cabinet, with past examples of his gaffes raised for good measure, most notably his comments while serving as Deputy Minister for Education in which he said any radioactive waste from the Dai-ichi nuclear plant should stay in Fukushima Prefecture “where nobody wants to live”, and when he described comfort women as “engaged in prostitution as a profession”.    

Sakurada is probably not going anywhere in the time being – after all the reshuffle was only two months ago, and there is still time for Sakurada to gain more knowledge of his portfolio. Moreover he is a factional ally of Nikai Toshihiro, Secretary General of the LDP, and Nikai wanted one of his men in cabinet in exchange for support during the LDP leadership election. So Sakurada will most likely survive this round of scrutiny, however he will be closely watched, and any subsequent gaffes could bring his ministerial career to an abrupt (but possibly welcome) halt. 

In the past I’ve written about the apparent apathy displayed by Japanese youth (or should that be ‘young people’) towards politics, but apathy may play less of a role than the relentless progress of population decline, particularly in rural areas. Evidence of the sharp decline in even relatively young people participating in regional politics because of the sheer lack of people of appropriate age to stand as candidates was made all the more evident by this article that appeared in the Nishi Nihon Shimbun on Wednesday.  Gokasechō, located in northern Miyazaki Prefecture, is set to have a town election in order to elect new members, yet as of the 22nd not a single person has put up their hand as a candidate. This is, according to the prefectural electoral office, the first time this has happened since records started to be collected on local elections in 1982, and speaks volumes about the crisis in ageing that affects rural districts across Japan.

In this state of affairs, any incumbents who happen to sit on town or village councils will presumably be re-elected by default, given there are no other candidates standing for election. The current mayor of Gokasechō, Ogasa Mayumi, says that they tried to get some young people and women to stand as candidates, yet were rebuffed with reasons such as not wanting to quit work or that it would be a burden on the family. Another reason highlighted in the article is that the remuneration for sitting on the town council is a mere 188,000 yen a month, which is well below the standard living wage and is the lowest such wage among all councils in the prefecture.

For those younger people living in rural areas, which in the case of Japan is something of a rare phenomenon, politics does not have much of a lure, for unlike city or even prefectural councils the decisions made at the local level are rarely influential and lack any of the ‘glamour’ associated with high-profile councils. Local council members often have to finance their own campaigns, which puts an additional burden on them when, in the case of younger town or village residents, they are still trying to establish their place in society and have other debts to consider.

Demographic squeeze is a problem that Japan has faced for over a decade, but the effects of that have mostly been confined to the welfare and education sectors. The steady regression in political participation in the regions has yet to be replicated in major urban centres, but it is only a matter of time before it does.  When that happens, expect to see a whole lot more advertising from the traditional political parties trying to make up for lost time and depict politics as ‘cool’, but by then the ship will have well and truly sailed. 

In a system dominated by access to party funding and generational politicians, the position of the independent representative will mostly depend on personal wealth and popularity, which is why politics will become a platform for entertainers and high-profile celebrities. This will serve to only emphasise the politics on urban areas and exacerbate the drop in political participation in rural areas. And this trend will continue unabated, for without an influx on new representatives local councils will stagnate and disappear, further marginalising the rural vote to the benefit of an entrenched and aging political class.  

Here’s an idea for a potential thesis. I wonder if anybody has taken the time to track the attitude towards women expressed by members of Japan’s ruling political class (aka, the LDP) and see if they have undergone any sort of progress in the last 30 years, because judging by commentary made this week by (serial gaffe meister) Asō Tarō and Lower House member for Nagasaki Kato Kanji, things don’t appear to have changed much at all. This is, after all, a party whose past members have condoned gang rape, proposed national awards for women who have more than 4 children, said that women were “machines to give birth”, said that women have ‘narrow vision’, said that women who don’t have children shouldn’t receive social welfare benefits, and so on (there are plenty more examples, but time constraints mean only the most recent and prominent could be assembled here).

For a party that has a specific platform to help women play a greater role in society, clearly something is amiss.  It might derive from the fact that Japan has the fourth lowest level of female participation in parliamentary politics among the OECD nations, with it ranked 159 out of 193 countries. A national assembly that has so little female representation is not likely to put much emphasis on issues concerning women, and most of those women in such parliaments find themselves pressured to conform to the views of the majority of their colleagues. 

It may also derive from the fact that a majority of those in the executive of the LDP are from a wealthy, privileged background, and whose privilege means that the women around them are likely to either have no formal employment or income source of their own, and whose only role has been that of mother (and briefly at that, given the prevalence of nannies and maids in these households). Any women they have come into contact with have been junior staff in their parliamentary offices, or general administrative staff in companies they have (briefly) worked for or in the Diet building. Their expectations towards women have been formed by their narrow interactions with them, and so their concept of women’s societal role is confined to ‘baby maker’ and little else.

What would be interesting to compare is whether these kinds of gaffes were as common or more prevalent in the past or whether awareness of them has only increased as a consequence of the spread of social media.  It would also be interesting to compare the type of commentary made to see whether any progress has been made in attitudes, or whether attitudes have remained fixated on certain select topics.  Of course not all members of the LDP share these views, and those comments made by LDP members that discriminate against women appear to be more of a reflection of their individual prejudices than an actual political platform, but their comments do their party no favours.

What a set of circumstances these are. In the wake of the resignation last week of Secretary of the Ministry of Finance Fukuda Junichi following allegations that he had engaged in sexual harassment towards a female journalist (from Asahi Television), the Abe government on Tuesday (24th April) agreed to accept Fukuda’s resignation. The only problem here is that Fukuda has never admitted that he did sexually harass the journalist, which essentially means that he’s escaped any imposition of punishment for his actions (and kept his pension).  In the meantime the opposition parties in the Japanese Diet are clamoring for the head of Finance Minister Aso Tarō, declaring that since Aso was the minister responsible for the ministry under which Fukuda was employed, he must have known of the allegations raised against Fukuda but did nothing to address them. 

The issue of sexual harassment is one that touches a very sensitive nerve in Japanese society, but the reaction to it illustrates the type of social attitudes that are more prevalent than not. While serial linguistic bomb thrower Aso has so far managed to avoid getting himself caught up in any gaffes, the same could not really be said for former Education and Science Minister Shimomura Hirofumi, who said that anyone (from a television station) who secretly records a conversation and then sells that to a weekly tabloid magazine has essentially committed a crime.  Keidanren chairman Sakakibara Sadayuki followed this up on Monday when he questioned the methods used by the female journalist when speaking to Secretary Fukuda (namely an invitation to drinks and a one-on-one interview), saying this could lead to ‘misunderstandings’ and perhaps restrictions should be placed on how journalists are able to conduct such interviews.

While the #Metoo movement had garnered considerable attention abroad, its message of gender equality and respect has yet to permeate the very male dominated social conscience of Japan. It’s not that Japanese women aren’t trying to make changes, it’s just the challenge confronting them is so great that any victories are difficult to notice against the overall size of the problem.   

One female journalist who has experienced the worst of a male-dominated social system and yet has chosen to resist the expectations placed on her (and others like her) in order to speak openly about the issue of rape and harassment in the Japanese workplace is Ito Shiori. Ito wrote about her experience of being drugged and raped by a more senior colleague while working at the Washington branch of TBS Television, and the struggle to get authorities to treat her case with the seriousness that it deserved.  It is an illustrative case of how power and social expectations combine to silence any criticism of the status quo, and how far Japanese women have to go to change social mores that still regard them as an afterthought in comparison to the demands of men.     

I’ve been examining aircraft crashes as of late, primarily in relation to the confirmation last weekend by the RAAF that an EA-18G Growler electronic warfare aircraft belonging to the Australian Air Force had been damaged while participating in Exercise Red Flag at the Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, USA. The jet suffered extensive damage to one of its rear tail sections after an apparent engine failure and fire following an aborted take-off attempt.

This incident, which raised barely a murmur here in Australia, stands in stark contrast to recent events in Okinawa, where in late December 2017 part of a CH-53E Super Stallion fell off the helicopter in flight over the city of Ginowan and landed in the grounds of a kindergarten.  This was the latest in a series of mishaps involving US (primarily Marine) military equipment over Japan, and served to heighten the fears of city residents about the mechanical state of US Marine Corps aircraft traversing over the city. Protests were lodged by the Okinawan prefectural government with both the federal government in Tokyo and the local US Marine Corps command, who (eventually) apologized for the incident and promised to ensure that there would be no repeat of it (I say eventually as the Marine Corps originally denied that the part fell off one of their helicopters in flight, only to confirm a few days later that it did in fact fall off a Marine Super Stallion).

Then late last month the Japanese government took the extraordinary step of appointing some of its own Ground Self Defence Force inspectors to Marine Corps bases in Okinawa in order to check the airworthiness of Marine equipment, specifically the AH-1Z Viper and UH-1Y Venom helicopters. According to Defence Minister Onodera, “The Ministry of Defense will promptly confirm and verify the state of inspections and maintenance conducted by the U.S. side utilizing the Self-Defense Forces’ professional and technical knowledge.”

It was not without a sense of irony, then, when news came on Tuesday morning of the crash of a GSDF AH-64 Apache helicopter into a residential area of the city of Kanzaki in Saga prefecture. In a press interview given later in the day, Defence Minister Onodera confirmed that the main rotor head on the helicopter had recently been changed during maintenance, thereby indicating that this may have been the cause of the accident. During Diet budget deliberations, PM Abe also issued an apology to city residents on behalf of the government, promising that everything would be done to prevent a similar incident from occurring.

This serves as a reminder that no matter how confident one might be in one’s technical prowess, accidents and mishaps are an inevitable part of base operations, and that goes double for the Marine Corps given the high tempo of activity in the western Pacific.  The powers that be might want to take this into consideration when voicing criticisms of Marine Corps, and might express some degree of sympathy for the aviators whose professionalism and sacrifice have prevented any greater disaster from occurring.     

In a week dominated by news that Yokozuna-ranked Sumo wrestler Harumafuji Kōhei had resigned from competition in the wake of a scandal that arose following his attack on fellow wrestler (and fellow Mongolian) Takanoiwa Yoshimori, another issue arose in the world of Japanese politics that is of greater consequence to society as a whole but which has not garnered that much attention. On the 22nd of November, Kumamoto City councilor Ogata Yuka brought her 7 month year old son with her into the city council chamber in order to highlight the difficulties of raising a child while also being a working mother. Far from eliciting any sympathy for her situation or the message she was trying to convey, the council chamber office declared that the presence of a “spectator” during council business was a violation of council rules and tried to have councilor Ogata leave the chamber so that business could continue “as scheduled”.

This particular attitude in Japan is no surprise, given that the country still has woefully low levels of female participation in senior levels of government and business (coming in at 114th in gender equality rankings issued by the World Economic Forum), and the traditional image of adult female roles in society have not undergone any substantial changes in over 50 years. Recently this image was reflected in commentary by former Diet Upper House Deputy Speaker Santo Akiko (LDP), who said that the Ministry of Health and Welfare should consider bestowing an award on any women who give birth to more than 4 children. Santo allegedly claimed that while women’s working role in society was being recognized, not enough recognition was being given to housewives, and an award would rectify that imbalance.

That this came from a senior member of the LDP in itself speaks to the level of the problem facing Japanese women who wish to raise a family but want the opportunity to pursue a career. The traditional role of women dictates that once they have children, they should resign from their current role and attend to their children, and that any aspirations they might have had to develop their skills have to be sacrificed in order to ensure their children are well cared for while the husband fulfils the role of the main salary earner. While this might have been true 40 years ago, the situation is very different for young families in Japan today. Cost of living pressures, coupled with a lack of permanent, steady employment, mean that both parents must work if the family is to reach a minimum level of comfort, but since the number of full-time jobs available to women with children are few, and given the dire lack of early childhood facilities across Japan, women are forced into child rearing while their husbands must bear the burden for most, if not all, of the household costs.   

This dilemma has been addressed in part by PM Abe’s push to have more women involved in the workforce and contributing to the Japanese economy, knowing full well that the lack of greater female representation in the workforce is a drain on Japan’s productivity and threatens Japan’s continued prosperity.  To address this, the LDP’s election promises during the October Lower House campaign included making nursery and kindergarten free to children aged from 2 to 5, as well as making higher education (namely high school) free to lower income households. 

Whether or not this can be realized, given the ever decreasing number of taxpayers from whom the government can draw the additional 10% increase to income tax to pay for the scheme, is debatable, but it at least shows that the LDP are seriously examining the issue of under-representation by women in Japanese society as a whole. Having said that, the decision by PM Abe to pledge a donation of 5.7 billion yen (US$ 50m) to Ivanka Trump’s support program for third world female entrepreneurship raised a few eyebrows, with criticism focused on the idea that if the PM was serious about supporting Japanese women’s social position, then surely such funds would be better off being spent in Japan than going overseas. 

That the presence of a child in a city council chambers should raise such a fuss is difficult to comprehend for many in Western nations, especially given the advances in women’s societal roles in those nations in the past decade or more (particularly here in Australia, where Greens Senator Larissa Waters made headlines after she breastfed her new-born daughter while engaging in Senate business in the Australian Parliament). It highlights just how far women, even those in positions of power, must go in Japan to achieve even the minimum level of recognition of the circumstances that working women face and how society must adapt to those changes.  To her great credit, councilor Ogata has expressed no remorse for her actions, and has used the incident to highlight the degree of bias that still exists to women playing a broader role in Japanese society. In that sense she is a pioneer, and should be commended for her actions.

Over the past two days, there have been a number of incidents at venues in both the Kansai and Kanto regions that point towards a concerted effort by unknown elements to disrupt public transport and educational institutions in Japan. In the first instance, a number of bomb threats were made via telephone on the 5th of November and concerned train stations, department stores, and ferries in the Kyoto, Osaka, and Hiroshima regions. On Tuesday, news came via the Sankei Shimbun that a bomb threat had been made against Waseda University in Tokyo, although the method of correspondence was via a web-based enquiry form (both of these threats follow on from a threat made against the Tōden coal-fired power station in Chiba Prefecture in late September, which was made via email).

The fact that no devices have yet been found also suggests that the purpose of the threats was to create disruption rather than casualties.

Terrorism in Japan is a phenomenon that has a long and storied history, but one element that has been constant in each incident is that the perpetrators have all been Japanese citizens. From the exploits of the prewar Genyōsha, to the activities of the Japanese Red Army in the 70s and 80s, right through to the Sarin gas attack on the Kasumigaseki station in 1995 by Aum Shinrikyō, all of these organizations have been formed and attacks carried out by Japanese nationals, although the targets have not always been Japanese citizens or institutions.  In this instance, since the threats have been limited to specific targets, and given that warnings have been issued beforehand, suggests that they have been done for nuisance value, distracting law enforcement agencies from other tasks and irritating commuters and tourists but not really intended to cause destruction.

Until the perpetrators are caught and their motives revealed, we can only speculate as to why these threats have been issued. They may be related to President Trump’s visit, they may be related to the recent election victory by the LDP/Komeito coalition, they may be an act of a left or right wing activist group intent on sending a message to authorities, they may be the work of a disgruntled citizen or group of citizens who object to some development in their local community, or they might be a case of simple harassment. It is unlikely to be terrorism inspired by religious teachings, and certainly not extremist terrorism, although the targets do have common characteristics with incident sites in other states. The use of a bomb threat alone distinguishes these threats from those made by extremists in other countries, although we do not yet know the details of the threats. What we do know is that they were made in Japanese, directly to Japanese institutions, and so point towards the standard pattern for terrorist threats in Japan.

So PM Abe has retained his position as PM and the LDP/Komeito has a super-majority in the Diet (313 seats) which, theoretically, gives them the numbers to push ahead with constitutional re-writing to legally establish the legitimacy of the SDF as an armed force and its role in the protection of the Japanese state. For PM Abe the gamble of going to the polls in the wake of scandal and the emergence of a potential rival in the Party of Hope was balanced by the positive economic data on the Japanese economy released earlier this month combined with the both real and existential threat posed by North Korea. These factors, combined with the appearance over the weekend of an intense typhoon that kept many voters from venturing outdoors, brought about a victory that had been expected to return the LDP/Komeito to power, but far greater in numbers than anticipated (the rate of voter turnout was the second lowest in postwar Japanese history, however).

While PM Abe himself has lost popularity in recent months, it appears that the disarray in the opposition parties, the lack of a truly viable centre or centre-left alternative to the LDP/Komeito coalition, and sheer voter apathy have returned the incumbent government to power for a fourth term. Abe is set to become the longest ever serving Japanese prime minister, surpassing both his grandfather and great uncle, and may also be the first Japanese prime minister in the post-war era to successfully re-write the constitution. Both of these will certainly cement Abe’s legacy in history, but whether they are in the best interests of the nation remains to be seen.  From the numerous polls conducted during the election campaign, it is clear that voters were looking for something to rejuvenate Japan’s political environment, but the lack of choice in realistic, or at least promising alternatives meant that voters faced the choice of either merely returning the current government or not bothering to vote at all. 

So the question that is now being banded around social and traditional media is whether Abe has the ability to go ahead with constitutional reform. All of the legal measures are in place to allow it occur, but the next step may be the toughest of all – convincing a skeptical Japanese public that revisionism is in fact necessary, and that by re-writing the constitution Japan will be better protected against external threats from neighboring states.  The Japanese public is split on the issue, and only an overwhelming majority in favour can lead the way to approval to re-word the constitution. Then again, if North Korea continues to keep shooting missiles in the direction of Japan then the public just might see the logic of changing the constitution, although it would do little to assuage the belief that the North Korean issue is a useful expedient for changing the constitution along the lines of the central-right ideology of the LDP.

In the meantime the issue of disproportionate representation has once again emerged in the wake of the 2017 election in the same manner that it did following the 2009, 2012, and 2014 elections. The Supreme Court ruled in each occasion that the election had occurred in an ‘unconstitutional’ manner because of the disparity in weighting for votes. A group of constitutional lawyers have again submitted writs to courts across the country in an attempt to have the election declared void, however this activity usually results in the Supreme Court ruling that while the result is unconstitutional in nature, it is still valid. The reasoning behind this says that declaring the result invalid and void would result in administrative chaos and have a negative effect on markets, thereby harming the state. So the result will stand, and the issue will continue to plague every federal election until it is resolved, one way or another.

From the point of view of bilateral relations, the re-election of PM Abe doesn’t change the dynamic between Australia and Japan. It will continue as per usual, although it might see more activity such as joint exercises between the armed forces of both countries, and possible co-ordination on ensuring the TPP is approved by the remaining 11 (possibly 10, depending on how New Zealand goes under the Ardern government) participating nations. The real question for bilateral relations is the longevity of the Turnbull government, but that is a question better addressed by other blogs.   

Over the past few years, as certainly since the mid-2000s, Yamamoto Taro has been making a name for himself as an actor, television personality and a politician with strong convictions. Personally, I first became of aware of Yamamoto through his performance in NHK’s 2004 historical drama “Shinsengumi!”(as Harada Sanosuke), however since 2011 it has been his political activism which has garnered the most public attention . Yamamoto was very publicly vocal in his opposition to Japan restarting its nuclear power plants in the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster, so much so that in the 2012 House of Representatives election he stood as an independent under the banner of his own party, the curiously named “New Party of One”, which took the abolition of nuclear power stations and transferal to renewable energies as its main platform. While he didn’t succeed on this occasion, his subsequent candidacy for the 2013 House of Councilors election (where he again ran as an independent) garnered enough votes to see him elected as a representative for the Tokyo metropolitan area.    

While Yamamoto is currently a representative of the Liberal Party (together with party leader Ozawa Ichiro), he has formed numerous  alliances over the past five years with the DPJ, Unity Party, New Socialist Party of Japan, and the Greens Japan, to name just a few. Yamamoto has primarily set himself against what he perceives to be the vested interests in Japan that ignore the general welfare of the people, particularly the right-wing, conservative agenda of the ruling LDP and Komeito parties. Yamamoto has voiced his opposition to the Abe government’s attempts at constitutional revision, its endorsement of the TPP, and its moves to restrict access to public information and strengthen national security laws. Furthermore, in 2013 Yamamoto made a name for himself by presenting a letter in person to Emperor Akihito at the Enyukai, an annual formal reception hosted by the Emperor, in which he advocated that Japan cease relying on nuclear energy by detailing the damage inflicted on Fukushima Prefecture and that under conservative governments the country was in danger of receding to a pre-war state of ignorance (an act for which he was reprimanded by the House of Councilors).

Yamamoto is unapologetic about his anti-conservative (or more correctly, anti-right wing) stance, going so far as to ridicule PM Shinzo Abe’s wife Akie Abe’s involvement in the Moritomo Gakuen scandal by referring to it as the “Ak-heed Scandal”, a reference to the Lockheed scandal of the mid 1970s that brought down then sitting PM Tanaka Kakuei (which elicited a sharp rebuke from PM Abe).  He has previously criticized NHK for being far too lenient towards the LDP in its questioning of the Kakei and Moritomo scandals (and called for viewers to boycott paying compulsory subscription fees to the national broadcaster), and has also criticized the continuation of whaling, the forced removal of homeless from Olympic venue sites, the Abe government’s decision not to enact (i.e., bring into force) the Paris Climate Agreement,  and is against PM Abe or members of his government paying visits to Yasukuni Shrine.

Yamamoto’s role seems to be one of, to use an Australian vernacular expression, “keeping the bastards honest”, pursuing the government on issues of social inclusion and the role of the state as well as reminding the government of its responsibility to its citizenry. This has made him a favourite target for right wing pundits and nationalist commentators, but it hasn’t dampened his enthusiasm for tackling subjects that might otherwise never see the light of day, and Japan politics is all the better for it.