Media figures of the year:
The "Right Brothers"
Conservatives supposedly made a comeback in 2012, but if you believe Japan's social outlook is basically conservative to begin with, you have to wonder what they were coming back from. The country's fiscal policy is anything but conservative, which is perhaps why the widespread use of the term is so confusing. The media clung to it as if it were a talisman, a means of making sense of the implosion of the nominally "liberal" Democratic Party of Japan less than three years after its decisive victory in a general election. Is the whole country, as the foreign media implies, turning "to the right"? And is that a good thing or a bad thing?