International Research Institute for Controversial Histories
advisor
Nishikawa Kyoko
The overpowering sense of existence of Prime Minister Abe being felt anew
It’s been a year since Prime Minister Abe was brutally shot to death. The tremendous sense of loss has been not a bit appeased all this while, and the greatness of his existence has been felt each day. As if in correspondence with the loss, it seems that the world is moving toward an undesirable and eerie direction. Once the world stood in the honeymoon mood between Prime Minister Abe and President Trump, without major conflicts and well-balanced with the leaders of advanced countries respecting each other. Only one country, China, tried to expand its military power, aggressively moving in the South China Sea, the East China Sea and around Japan. From that time onward, the U.S. China policy has been drastically changed and the sense of a threat coming from China has been rapidly spreading among the advanced countries.
Seeing such global circumstances, I cannot help but feel how great the presence of Prime Minister had been. In the strong and trustful relationship with President Trump, Prime Minister Abe supposedly told the U.S. President on every available occasion what a perilous threat China is and how dangerous China’s self-righteous political stand is. He probably informed him that at present, China’s expansionism constantly creates the threat of military invasion, regarding Japan as an imaginary enemy and that this situation is extremely dangerous to the United States.
In the postwar years, the United States policy toward China was consistently China-friendly, including the one of the Republican Party. China has been receiving enormous amounts of economic aid from both the United States and Japan and at present has acquired huge economic and military powers. China has now become a monster, nearly overpowering the United States and demonstrating its overwhelming presence to the world. The world owed much to Prime Minister Abe, who endeavored to let the major world leaders recognize the menace of China. But he is gone now. The war in Ukraine is getting more and more complicated and chaotic, Russia and China are getting closer to each other, and Japan finds itself in the extremely difficult position amid the two.
Non-commonsense claims rapidly spread today
In the world successively plagued by the corona-virus disaster and the war in Ukraine, the trend of globalism has become vividly conspicuous. Globalism, at the first glance, may look beautiful, but at its root, it is close to communism and is a movement aiming to steer things into one direction. It seems that the destination of globalism is rootlessness, confusion, emptiness and loss of identity as a human. Losing the sense of a state, more like in terms of reducing the state to individuals, individuals rather than the whole, minority rather than majority, extraordinary rather than ordinary, and so forth---the society that up to now has been well-balanced on such traditional relationships has recently changed into a society with the emphasis on just one side, putting ordinary existence and common sense into an awkward position. The mass media and those with social status cater today to people who loudly assert their non-commonsense claims, and their non-commonsense views are pushed aggressively to the center. I wonder since when have the Japanese people became such a deplorable nation. The Japanese people used to be very considerate of each other.
The typical incident riding on this recent trend was the enactment of the law to enhance the understanding of LGBT. I was totally appalled at the passing of this LGBT bill. The bill has been discussed and the attempt to enact the law has been made over the last seven years and while Prime Minister Abe was alive, the conservative Diet members of the Liberal Democratic Party had been fending off the movement. However, after Prime Minister Abe was killed, entering this year, suddenly and speedily, the bill was passed, led by supposedly conservative Diet members, ignoring many opposing voices within the Party. The excuse of those Diet members for leading the passing of the bill was that the LDP had taken over the opposition parties’ radical bill, considerably amending and correcting the wordings, in response to questions and concerns raised by the conservative group and simply held by the public. However, before such an excuse, there is a fact that even the United States has been very careful anticipating problems involved and has not passed the LGBT related bill at the Federal level. Why, then, did Japan pass the bill, in advance of the rest of the world? I feel that this is very dubious and inadequate. I would like to hear what Prime Minister Kishida really believes to be right.
The movement of the LGBT related legislation is advanced rather at the municipal level. Including Tokyo as a starter, fifty municipals across the country have enacted ordinance to prohibit discriminatory treatment based on sexual orientation or identity. The speed of the trend is amazing. The trend to enact this bill, using the “verbal tool” of anti-discrimination, further leads to the destruction of the marital system by the introduction of the partnership system. At the root of this chain of movements lies the promotion of political correctness, leading to the destruction of the entire order concerned with the identity of the Japanese people, such as Japanese traditions, culture, customs, common sense that have been nurtured over our long history. This is not a reform. A reform does not change the essential axis of the matter but changes the methods. However, the recent movement can be termed as white revolution, riding on the current of globalism. Without using arms, leading the human mind and thinking at the base of all the fields of human activities to a certain direction. I think this can be called mental revolution or a trend of thought control.
The Supreme Court should reach the judgment, considering the common sense of the public in the broad perspective
In less than a month after the LGBT bill was passed, on this July 11, the Supreme Court returned a verdict in the small court, recognizing the plaintiff’s complaint that the transgender worker of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry be allowed to freely use women’s restrooms in the workplace. It was reportedly the unanimous decision of the five judges. What can I say? I thought judges are to reach judgment, in consideration of the public common sense and in the broad perspective, but, alas, they are not. They seem to live in a narrow and small world.
This year, in Saitama Prefecture, which enacted ordinance related to LGBT in 2022, they conducted a survey of public comments on making the basic plan. A total of 417 comments were turned in, 80% of which were against the plan. I think this is the exact consensus of ordinary Japanese. I only hope that the education for understanding LGBT at schools may not go too far, ignoring what parents, pupils and students feel. I used to fight against people trying to promote extreme sex education in Tokyo Metropolis. I cannot help thinking that advocates of the LGBT movement seem to have the same ideas as those advocates of sexual education I met in the past.
From the ancient times, countries with monotheism like Christianity and Islam have been very strict as their precept in dealing with sexual matters and homosexuality used to be severely punished as a crime. Therefore, the movement of LGBT tended to be radical. Comparing with monotheistic countries, Japan has been worshipping nature gods, which can be termed as polytheism and this kind of matter must have been dealt with in an extremely lenient, generous and open-minded way. Throughout our long history, various people have coexisted in a properly harmonious way. Therefore, it is totally unsuitable that Japan, having a history of such mature and moderate sexual responses, was the first to enact the “Promotion of LGBT Understanding Law” in the world.