Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's dissolution of the Diet has become another point of contention between right- and left-leaning entities in Japan. One of the more revealing responses involved a website set up by a member of a nonprofit organization called Bokura no Ippo ga Nihon wo Kaeru (Our One Step Will Change Japan) and presented as the work of a 10-year-old boy who wonders why Abe did what he did. As translated into English by JapanCrush, the text is simplistic in the way it focuses on the wastefulness of the election and the less admirable results of "Abenomics." It obviously wasn't written by a child and doesn't seem designed to fool anyone on that count, though it did. Such rhetorical gambits are common in Japanese media as a means of making issues understandable to the average person, though the mock style of the post rubbed many readers, including Abe, the wrong way, forcing the person who wrote it to quit the NPO and apologize. The most telling complaint was from a contributor to textboard 2Channel, who said, "Don't do things like the Asahi Shimbun does."
This individual is referring to the nominally left-wing newspaper's recent problems with past reporting that proved to be false, and as with the Asahi's subsequent persecution, the website's vilification has more to do with the perceived political stance of its author than with its content, thus setting up a situation familiar to veterans of the culture wars in the United States, where the public is conditioned by certain parties to hate liberals and "elites" in order to promote a self-serving agenda that, when scrutinized objectively, hurts the interests of the public more than helps them.
Granted, Japan's electorate doesn't seem thrilled with the upcoming snap election, and in interviews voters question its timing. But the general mood is that there isn't enough reason not to vote for the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, either because the opposition isn't a credible alternative or because the respondents have bought Abe's claim, verbalized testily during his Nov. 18 press conference, that Abenomics is the only answer to Japan's fiscal ills because no one has proposed anything better.