It looks like Prime Minister Abe's Liberal Democratic Party (Jiminto) has won a major victory. Tomorrow's newspapers will present a national overview of the election but since this is a Kumamoto page, I'd like to focus in on the projected winner of Kumamoto City's first ward, Minoru Kihara.
I think it's fair to locate Mr. Kihara on the far right of Japan's political spectrum. He was one of a group of ideologues who signed a paid advertisement published in the Washington Post that former University of Chicago Professor Norma Field described as a "a compendium of rightwing revisionist talking points on the 'comfort women.'" Field indicates that backlash to this extreme political ad was one factor that led to the passage in the United States House of Representatives to "House Resolution 121 that called on the Japanese Government to 'acknowledge, apologize, and accept historical responsibility in a clear and unequivocal manner for its Imperial Armed Forces’ coercion of young women into sexual slavery, known to the world as "comfort women" ….'"
https://www.globalresearch.ca/japans-world-war-ii-comfort-women-revisionism-comes-to-the-u-s/5453023
"The Facts" ad, listing Mr. Kihara's name, can be found here:
https://img.atwikiimg.com/www22.atwiki.jp/doc_exam2007/attach/1/23/thefact_070614.jpg
Mr. Kihara is also a member of Nippon Kaigi, described as follows in a New York Times article:
"A U.S. Congressional report on Japan-U.S. relations from early this year mentioned Nippon Kaigi as one of several organizations to which Mr. Abe has ties that believe that 'Japan should be applauded for liberating much of East Asia from Western colonial powers, that the 1946-1948 Tokyo War Crimes tribunals were illegitimate, and that the killings by Imperial Japanese troops during the 1937 "Nanjing massacre" were exaggerated or fabricated.'"
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/13/opinion/tea-party-politics-in-japan.html
Despite the low numbers of foreigners in Kumamoto, he still manages to be very upset by proposals to improve the conditions of foreigners residing in Japan. One example of his xenophobia that I found particularly interesting was the "video letter" to be found on the following page:
http://kiharaminoru.jp/modules/channel0/2013/02/
In it, Mr. Kihara rails against the following change in the law governing foreign residents:
"On July 9, 2012, the alien registration system was abolished and foreigners are now able to apply as part of the Basic Resident Registration System. Foreigners who reside in Japan for more than three months need to register for national health insurance."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Health_Insurance_(Japan)
The law is intended to insure that all foreign residents of Japan have health insurance. Mr. Kihara and his accomplice on the ultraconservative "Sakura Channel" opine that this will allow foreigners to abuse the system and steal tax revenues paid in by law-abiding Japanese. In retrospect, this claim seems similar to the "The Facts" ad placed in the Washington Post in that it is so far to the right that even the Abe administration has not embraced it. As far as I know, with the exception of ideologues like Mr. Kihara and his friends in Sakura Channel and Nippon Kaigi, the extension of health care to foreigners with three-month or longer visas has been entirely uncontroversial.
-- This screed has been brought to you by Kirk
