The More we Saw of Prime Minister Abe…

Correction (May 24, 17:28): I made a huge, huge mistake with this post. Somehow, I managed to misread Mr. Abe's comments on his website. In fact, he claims that Bunshun identified the wrong murder victim as the person Mr. Abe had in mind, and went to that victim's mother, took her comment, and wrote up the article. This undermines the fundamental premise of this post. My apologies to Mr. Abe. I'm leaving this here, though, since one of the worst kind of online experiences is coming back to an online source to find that it has been surreptitiously and substantively altered. That's intellectual fraud, a breach of online ethics. So my embarrassment needs no caching, as long as this bog exists.

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Julián Ortega Martínez gives us an off-topic heads-up (see comments) on Shinzo Abe’s trip to Columbia. A show of solidarity for a democracy pushing back what was once a leftist guerilla movement but has long since deteriorated into a massive criminal operation? Good thing, even if you have to go to President Uribe’s website to find out about the visit. Heaven knows it’s being ignored by the Japanese media too. I looked at Mr. Abe’s website, and it isn’t there either. Could it be that he doesn’t think it’s a good idea to be too conspicuously out-of-town while the “twisted” Diet is in session?

Maybe, maybe not. For Mr. Abe’s website is somewhat unusual, even for a Seiwa-kai-related blog. Half the space on his home page is currently (May 23) taken up by an explanation of his complaint against a tabloid weekly over its treatment of his comments regarding crime victims’ rights—a decidedly proper subject of public discourse in its own right. Now he’s dead serious, but However, as far as his own complaint is concerned, as dead serious as he is about it, I don’t think that he would have a case in the courts; the way I see it, he’s splitting hairs as far as allegations of misrepresentations by the media go. More troubling, comparing the two sides of the story as scrupulously related in his commentary reminds me very much of his ill-fated efforts to parse the Kohno Statement on the comfort women.

The other major item on his home page happens to be an exposition on his reference to human rights in Tibet and Xinjiang-Uyghur. Over all, there’s little to no effort to proactively highlight his policy initiatives as well as his public activities. His latest “news” item dates back to January 7. My, the site does not have a blog.

And I used to wonder how he fell apart so quickly.

As you might have guessed, Mr. Abe's site does not have a blog.

May 24 edit in italics