“Making North Korea into an ever-present threat has helped Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his circle of ultranationalist government officials unify the nation behind their government. Recent escalating tensions between Washington and Pyongyang only help promote the narrative that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s policies are good for Japan, keeping the population focused on an external enemy.” I hereby admit that I stole most of the wording in the previous two sentences from CNN. All I had to do was exchange one group of actors for another.
Below I outline five reasons why Abe and his circle of ultranationalists hate the Olympic Truce and are looking forward to getting back to “maximum pressure” (i.e., preventing peace between North and South Korea through genocidal sanctions, threats of a second holocaust on the Korean Peninsula, etc.)
1/ Family Honor
Some of Japan’s top ultranationalists, including Japan’s Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister, and the Minister in charge of the 2020 Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games, have ancestors who were major beneficiaries of Japan’s empire, and they also want to restore the “honor” of those ancestors, people who tortured, murdered, and exploited Koreans, among others. Shinzo Abe, the current prime minister, is the grandson of Kishi Nobusuke, an A-class war criminal who barely escaped the death penalty. Kishi was a protégé of Hideki Tojo. The relationship between…