Commentary | COUNTERPOINT Sep 23, 2017

In Japan under Shinzo Abe, more power to the PM, but to what end?

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

Commentary | COUNTERPOINT Sep 16, 2017

Grading Abe's flailing leadership and policy drift

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

Commentary | COUNTERPOINT Sep 9, 2017

Abe's extremism undermines Japan's interests

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.

Commentary | COUNTERPOINT Sep 2, 2017

Happy history in China, the land of the politically repressed

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.

Commentary | COUNTERPOINT Aug 26, 2017

Koike tests possibilities and perils of populism in Japan

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.

Commentary | COUNTERPOINT Aug 19, 2017

Abe tries to ride out storm in bid to restore trust deficit

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 ...

Commentary | COUNTERPOINT Aug 12, 2017

The unfinished business of Indian partition

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.

Commentary | COUNTERPOINT Aug 5, 2017

Beleaguered Abe on the ropes as support weakens

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

Commentary | COUNTERPOINT Jul 29, 2017

Labor reforms come up short for Japan's 'precariat'

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.

Commentary | COUNTERPOINT Jul 22, 2017

A reset for Abe's constitutional revision agenda?

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