COUNTERPOINT

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.

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.

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.