What has become of Comrade Abe?

In the good old days of the 1980s, as the Soviet Union was sagging to its doom, the country was led by a series of men about whom it could charitably be said that they might as well have been dead.

For months at a time, they would be invisible except as signatures at the bottom of official communiques, or distant figures saluting stiffly from balconies and reviewing platforms. Later, it would emerge that the men in charge of one of the world's biggest nuclear arsenals had been ill and incapable for years.

And yet the absence of a paramount leader did not create a crisis. The USSR lumbered on, sustained by the sheer mass and weight of its bureacracy, a beast that lived and breathed even without a head. And so it is now in Japan, 25 years later, where the successor to Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, clings on to power on a political life support machine -

- Shinzo Abe.

That is the implication, at least, of this report from yesterday's Asahi Shimbun. The gist of it is that, when Abe'a new Agricultrue Minister, Takehiko Endo, was exposed as a suspected embezzler and forced to resign less than a week after taking office, the prime minister himself had little to do with the decision making. Taro Aso, the secretary-general of the Liberal Democratic Party, and the man most likely to be the next prime minister, and Kaoru Yosano, the chief cabinet secretary, took matters into their own hands, handed Endo the revolver, and stepped outside while he did the gentlemanly thing. (I speak metaphorically - although Endo's predecessor but one, Toshikatsu Matsuoka, did in fact leave office at the end of a self-fashioned noose.) According to the Asahi, Abe himself was thoroughly ineffectual, avoiding a decision and bleating, "I haven't heard details, and if there are questions raised, he [Endo] should explain properly."

As the first LDP leader to have lost control of the Upper House of the Diet, it is rather far-fetched that Abe should have survived this long as prime minister - so perhaps the Soviet solution is a sensible one in the circumstances. Abe's credibility is irreparably damaged - but the LDP faces a desperately difficult autumn as the opposition attempts to rip chunks out of it with its new Upper House majority. So it makes sense to conceal the fact that an electoral stroke has reduced the prime minister to a political vegetable and wheel him out for public appearances (with a looped tape concealed in his bath chair repeating key phrases - "Beautiful Japan ... resolution of abduction issue . . . moving beyond the post-war period" etc etc). Meanwhile, Aso and Yosano can jointly make the important decisions, like good old fashioned Shadow Shoguns, until the moment comes to switch of Abe's life support, and edge into his seat.

Long Live the Eternal Revolution!

Comments

[Chen]

political vegetable? that's funny.yes, it's a vegetable who is calm and well, expecting a beautified regime which is beyond the restrictions of the postwar peace constitution. by the way, we have a lot of political fruits here imported from the SE Asia.