Abenomics and Abegeopolitics

On December 26, 2012, a general election took place in Japan. The outcomes were astounding. As Takashi Inoguchi

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describes in his year-end article for 2012, the voters “swing, and then swing away soon.” It was in 2005 that the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), then the major governing party, won a dramatic electoral victory. During the couple of months in 2005 after Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro’s triumphant victory and the couple of months in 2006 before his resignation from the prime ministership and politics, he held a garden party in Shinjuku Gyoen in Tokyo where his keynote speech reiterated a poem of Hosokawa Galasha, a sixteenth-century Christian wife of a feudal lord. She was besieged by her husband’s rivals in his absence and committed suicide after composing and singing a poem

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Like the sakura (cherry blossom), which knows when to bloom and when to fall, men become men only when they know when they should put an end to their life.