A measure of cross-party consensus appears to be emerging in the ongoing hostage drama after the Japanese Communist Party reprimanded one of its lawmakers for criticizing Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's handling of the crisis.
On her official Twitter account on Sunday, Lower House member Saori Ikeuchi sniped at Abe for his response to the crisis, suggesting that he himself was somehow responsible for it.
"The Abe administration sounds like a broken tape recorder," she wrote, accusing it of merely repeating how "outrageous" events were.