The vote will decide all 465 seats in parliament’s lower house and mark Takaichi’s first electoral test since becoming nation’s first female leader.
By Al Jazeera Staff and News Agencies
Japan’s Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has said she will dissolve parliament on Friday and call a general election to seek voter backing for her spending plans and other policies.
The snap election announcement on Monday comes just three months into her tenure as the nation’s first female prime minister. ……
That’s fair, this is gonna be long, this is a particularly interesting tpoic to me. Although Japan has been very much removed from the world through much of its history, isolated. Even pre-Sakoku the nation rarely showed an interest outside of the islands around it, and Korea a couple times. Japan is a fascinating country when you look at the education and militarism.
It’s helpful to understand the Japan of the period around the world wars to understand Japan now. Japan had their arms forcibly removed from them after a period of extreme imperialism, which lasted from the period post the Sakoku policy beginning in the 1850’s until the post ww2 period.
Japan went from a nearly pre-industrialized fuedal style system to a fully industrial nation with a modern military during the Meiji Restoration over a period of like 40 years. After the first Sino-Japanese war they attained an incredible amount of power, resources and reputation. What followed was a period of colonial effort with a sort of Japanese supremacy bent to it that was notable in it’s cruelty and effectivness.
The last 20 years Japan has been re-militarizing. They started on the 1950s, but truly didn’t start building real capacity until mid 2010’s. Since 2022 they’ve been building a full military in earnest, to the point where China is treating them like the US is trying to treat other countries, not selling them the really good stuff for aggression and defense.
Much like the US, Japan doesn’t exactly see itself as the bad guy in all of that, they teach that aggression had consequences, but the amount they omit about what Japan DID over there during from 1890-1940 is vast. They are still a resource poor country that relies on trade, but unlike the Japan of the past, the current Japan seems terrified of conflict, with a youth who seem unwilling to die for the country.
But again, even at the heights of their aggression and colonialism, they were a drop in the bucket compared to the West (including the US), or China, or Russia (in all it’s forms). It’s not even a comparison to the US, the US is still and has not stopped being bloodhungry imperialists.