In his final Counterpoint column, Jeff Kingston considers where Japan is heading under scandal-hit Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

In his penultimate Counterpoint column, Jeff Kingston gives Shinzo Abe a report card for the prime minister's nearly five years in office.

Alas, Japan's extremists have still not given up trying to find honor in the nation's 1945 wartime defeat and and the ideology that led to it.

Talk about negative nation branding! With the Cambridge University Press affair, Chinese authorities have really outdone themselves in drawing attention to their fear of history.

Abe occupies Koike's ideological comfort zone, so she needs to cannibalize his base to get any traction. It is thus imperative that she presents an alternative policy agenda to highlight their differences and tap into simmering dissatisfaction with the status quo.

A shoo-in a few months ago, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's plunge in popularity imperils his re-election to a third term as LDP president in September 2018, fueling speculation about when he will go and who will replace him. That said, it's still too soon ...

The nightmarish horrors of India's partition by the British 70 years ago on Aug. 15, 1947, cast a long shadow into the 21st century.

The public has seen the true face of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and doesn't like what it sees.

The costs of not improving the lot of nonregular workers are enormous in terms of thwarted careers, social status, poverty — and even isolation, as they have a much lower marriage rate.

The sudden implosion in Abe's popularity has significant consequences for his agenda of constitutional revision.