Commentary | COUNTERPOINT Sep 16, 2017
Grading Abe's flailing leadership and policy drift
by Jeff Kingston
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
by Jeff Kingston
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
by Jeff Kingston
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
by Jeff Kingston
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
by Jeff Kingston
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
by Jeff Kingston
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
by Jeff Kingston
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'
by Jeff Kingston
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?
by Jeff Kingston
The sudden implosion in Abe's popularity has significant consequences for his agenda of constitutional revision.
Commentary | COUNTERPOINT Jul 15, 2017
A decade after Niigata's nuclear close call
by Jeff Kingston
On July 16, 2007, a 6.8 magnitude earthquake rattled the world's largest nuclear power complex at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa — a site that the government and Tepco had insisted was seismically safe.
Commentary | COUNTERPOINT Jul 8, 2017
Tokyo poll offers Abe an opportunity to take a long, hard look in the mirror
by Jeff Kingston
We have witnessed Abe's peak and he is now a diminished leader, with the aura of invincibility he projected since December 2012 now gone.
Commentary | COUNTERPOINT Jul 1, 2017
The 80th anniversary of Japan's invasion of China
by Jeff Kingston
Japan's actions at Marco Polo Bridge, and its subsequent campaign to conquer China, unleashed a maelstrom that casts a long shadow over Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's efforts to turn the page on this history.