Populism Comes of Age In Japan

Donald Trump’s “largest trade deal in history”, hyperbole for the agreement just reached with Japan, will help the world’s debt-ridden fourth-largest economy but it might be too late for Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba whose LDP, having governed Japan for almost all of its post-war years, lost its Upper House majority in the Diet on July 20. (It had lost its Lower House majority last October.) The man of the moment, Sohei Kamiya, a former supermarket manager and English teacher, had founded his Sanseito party perhaps as an angry joke on YouTube during the pandemic. But Sanseito ended up with 14 seats, up from one, on a ‘Japanese First’ platform that borrows liberally from MAGA, Germany’s AfD and France’s National Rally, with the peculiarly Japanese variety of instinctive xenophobia thrown in—there are apparently too many immigrants keeping native Japanese out of work, taking their benefits, and adding to the crime data. And too many tourists making a mess. Kamiya also wants women to leave the workforce to be good mothers, an agenda he tempered with realism to get their votes. For the record, foreigners are still only 3 per cent of Japan’s population against the backdrop of a very low birth rate. But that hasn’t stopped even anti-Semitism creeping into Sanseito’s pamphlets against a ‘global conspiracy’ of “international financial capital”.

Ozzy’s Final Goodbye

The man who invented heavy metal with his band Black Sabbath had been doing farewell tours since the early 1990s but he didn’t last three full weeks after his actual last concert in his native Birmingham on July 5. Ozzy Osbourne, born John Michael Osbourne in 1948, aka the Prince of Darkness, was rock ‘n’ roll’s quintessential bad boy, whose life of drugs, drink and debauchery culminated in the Parkinson’s that probably ended his life on July 22. Black Sabbath’s progeny include AC/DC, Guns ‘n’ Roses, Metallica, Slayer, Motörhead, et al. For many, Ozzy was the genuine working-class hero. That meant working in an abattoir as well as the tragicomic case of a TV falling on his head while burgling a house. No wonder, his dysfunctional family would pioneer reality TV. “If anyone has lived the debauched rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, I suppose it’s me,” he once said. That included throwing raw meat and animal parts at his audience, one 17-year-old member of which had retaliated in January 1982 by throwing on stage what Ozzy took to be a rubber bat as he bit its head off. The bat was real but, contrary to the legend, it wasn’t alive.

A Tale of Two Files

While the Trump administration has tied itself up in MAGA knots with the Jeffrey Epstein files, on July 21, it released more than 230,000 pages of documents on the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr which could shed new light on the investigation. This follows an executive order signed by President Trump in January authorising the release of the MLK files as well as those pertaining to the assassination of John F Kennedy, which were released in March. The reason, as maintained by Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi, is transparency. MLK’s surviving children asked for respect for King’s legacy, still angry at the FBI’s alleged attempt to “discredit, dismantle and destroy” his reputation. As it happens, they don’t accept James Earl Ray had killed their father.

Donald TrumpJapanMartin Luther King JrOzzy OsbournepopulismSohei Kamiya