Regarding the story "Nearly 70% of public doesn't buy Abe's Moritomo explanations" in the April 16 edition, in a little reported incident on April 13, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe used his majority wild card in the Diet to shelve any possibility of a timely investigation into his and his wife's dealings with the Moritomo school by forcing a vote to delay discussions indefinitely.

This free hand to sweep his own shady attitudes and activities under the tatami, as it were, was given him by a minority of the electorate comprising those who actually bothered to vote or didn't properly consider what they were doing when they placed his party in an unassailable position of power.

In other words, the Liberal Democratic Party has usurped the spirit and power of democracy to promote its own agenda at the expense of the public's right to fair government, open discussion and freedom of information.

The seriously high figure of 70 percent distrust is just the tip of an iceberg of half a century of pent-up disgust and disillusion with a government that serves only itself by hoodwinking a gullible population and continually seeks new ways to both deprive taxpayers of their hard-earned income just to waste it on ludicrous projects like nuclear power and the pipe dream of military rearmament, not to mention a shambolic health and pension scheme.

South Korea's public has just put Japan to shame by showing them how to treat a monster like its disgraced ex-president Park Geun-hye.

Now that the government has manipulated the Moritomo monstrosity out of the picture, the whole scandal will just slide out of our attention as though it never happened. This recurrent maneuvering to prevent any essential scrutiny of the most nefarious activities in society has been repeated countless times in the last 50 years, and has reduced Japan to a society of silent self-denial, a Japan that can't say "no" or even "yes" because it doesn't know the difference anymore.

David John

DAZAIFU, FUKUOKA PREFECTURE

The opinions expressed in this letter to the editor are the writer's own and do not necessarily reflect the policies of The Japan Times.