Japan's PM Abe: "I Want Next Governor of Tokyo to Be A Young Woman"

Well, as if it would be his to decide. The gubernatorial election to be called early next year in Tokyo is a local election, albeit an important one if only because Tokyo is the most populous prefecture in Japan.

In case you haven't heard about it, Tokyo Governor Naoki Inose, who won the election in December last year with a landslide (he amassed the largest ever number of votes in the Tokyo gubernatorial election) and won the 2020 Olympic for Tokyo, suddenly found himself a target of the suddenly righteous press in Japan (who have all but stopped coverage of the State Secrecy Protection Law as soon as it passed the Upper House), and has been forced out of office.

Mr. Inose's sin? Having received a "huge", no-interest campaign loan (50 million yen, or 500,000 US dollars) from a hospital chain that provided campaign funds to a host of other national politicians, many of them in Liberal Democratic Party in the December 2012 Lower House election/local elections.

Mr. Inose did an extremely poor job of explaining away (he miserably failed), and for that small amount, as far as the politics go in Japan and which he claims he has returned, he resigned on December 19, 2013.

Is the righteous mainstream (national) media in Japan going after the national politicians in the ruling party?

Nope.

It's not that I think highly of Mr. Inose (I don't), but the way the mainstream media (particularly Asahi, who had a "scoop" - sure, sure) and LDP blew it out of proportion from a potential bribery case into a circus is highly suspicious. Now that Mr. Inose has resigned, all is well, the case closed, not just for Inose but most likely for any politician who received money from the hospital chain.

Mr. Inose's word says it all: "I was a politically naive amateur."

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, on December 18 even before Governor Inose announced he would resign, was quoted as saying this on TV Tokyo:

自民党関係者によりますと、安倍総理は都知事候補について若い女性がいい」と周辺に話していたということです。

According to the source connected to LDP, Prime Minister Abe was telling his staff that the candidate for the Governor of Tokyo should be a young woman.

Young woman. Meaning someone (or a whole lot of them) like these, Abe's favorite, dressed in a school-uniform-like outfit (you are supposed to see them as high school girls)?

(My sincere condolence to the ASEAN ministers and their spouses who were subjected to this "entertainment" by PM Abe. If you were thinking about teaming up with Abe's Japan to counter the pressure from China, good luck.)

Oh by the way, the "candidates" (unofficial, undeclared for now) picked by a TV program (Asahi, I think) are beyond the pale for most Japanese net citizens:

Candidates with yellow background color are from the opposition, blue from LDP. They don't even look human, but four out of seven are girls. Not sure about "young".

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