Mushrooming Myopia

Shinzo Abe, the "conservative" (hard-right, in Oldspeak) former prime minister of Japan, is the scion of an illustrious line. His maternal grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, was a prominent war criminal under the military junta during the 1930s, and was imprisoned by the Americans before taking the Wernher von Braun-Klaus Barbie amendment. Installed as prime minister in the fifties, Kishi redeemed his war record by helping to create a pro-American one-party state, and was later denounced as "a tiny little nihilist ... unable to believe in his political principles" by no less a patriot than Yukio Mishima.

This honourable ancestry will not have been lost upon the Heathen Chinee, who have reacted with irritation to Abe's latest helpful intervention in Japanese politics. Abe has a long record of minimising or dismissing Japanese crimes against China, Korea and other involuntary beneficiaries of the twentieth-century imperial expansion, and of agitating for ever more military spending. He is now calling for "open discussion" about the prospect of Japan's serving as the carrier for a US-controlled "independent nuclear deterrent." The present prime minister slapped the suggestion down, having apparently allowed himself to be biased against patriotism, family values, Britishness and the lessons of history by the mere fact that his constituency is in Hiroshima.