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Steve Martin's avatar

I've been living continuously in Japan for 40 years now, and have been in conversations with my best friend and partner, who was also a rare female 'kacho' for the personnel department of a major Japanese corporation. We got the news by cell phone about 2 hours after the incident, and both thought of the same thing ... oh shit. Just as the opposition was beginning to pick up some steam by pointing out the cognitive dissonance and corruption in the LDP, the right-wing, super-majority ruling LDP is now a shoe-in for next week's coming elections because of the sympathy vote. Now a couple of days later, Japanese Twitter is blazing with comments saying the same.

This is not good news for the average working class Japanese. Not only will the high taxes on basic commodities be rolled back, but unprecedented military spending will (is now) escalating, They plan on amending the peace-time constitution to something more pre-emptive, and are proposing the suspension of future elections thus keeping them in power permanently ... more or less following the Chinese model.

Here on the ground, a popular tweet said it was both nice and natural for workers at cash registers to chat with the elderly in the check-out line ... prompting one govt. affiliated medical 'professional' to call for the elimination of any face-to-face human business transaction through digitalization of the transaction and the currency. Of course, this is to protect us from assymptomatic (not sick) carriers of a microbe that appears to have an odd correlation with other aspects of an ailing economy. With the results of next week's elections in the bag, I am afraid the techno-feudalism of China will be upon us, in full force.

James Corbett is a rare example of a vanishing breed of good journalism. Been following him for a couple of years ... but my browser seems to finds ways of keeping him out of my regular feeds.

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pandelis's avatar

first gates and gauci travel to london and bojo is sacked ... now abe is done ...

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