Shinzo Abe of Japan Back in Spotlight Over Tampered Documents

This article gives me a clearer picture of what's wrong with the administration here. I hate PM Abe and his cohorts' desire for falsifying documents and other records to suit their own convenience. The government's internal auditing didn't work very well earlier. Now that their circle having been abusing privileges and ruining the national interest is evident, they should vanish from the political arena as soon as possible. I believe we need to re-establish the sound system of administrational documentation (making, keeping and disclosing official documents) from the scratch as the conventional one doesn't work properly. Otherwise, the government wouldn't grow up by learning from the present and past, and by being reviewed and tested by future generations. I feel we are in the dark ages.

MB -good point but off topic, GB - this scandal is huge here in Japan Belasco - you are extrapolating way too far and off topic. Breaking it down as much as I understand from the news today, the wife of the prime minister of Japan helped out a friend setting up a new very right wing elementary school. Political pressure was used to drop the price of the land which involved official land evaluation documents being faked. The question about the documents is who did what when. The head of the National Tax agency has resigned. There is huge pressure on the deputy PM/ Finance minister Aso to resign (to take responsibility for the problem. - This is a key phrase in Japanese politics). 300 items or more were redacted from the land purchase documents. This goes all the way up to PM Abe and will result in a huge power vacuum if he resigns (looking more and more probable). Abe is saying "we have to rebuild trust" in his cabinet. This is the second key phrase in any Japanese political or business scandal. He is toast.

As much as I’ve been anticipating Abe to get the boot, I don’t see any apparent prospects to replace the current corrupt prime minister (and administration)... Of course, it would be culture changing for a younger politician like Shinjiro Koizumi to fill those shoes, but like the article says, these government bureaucrats are “very secretive, arrogant and authoritative”—with a strong emphasis on ARROGANT.

When the government hides the facts, trampers with evidences, denies witnesses, doesn't disclose documents, lies to the congress, attacks the media as fake - to give money and real estate to ultra-nationalist school that teaches to bring back the wartime ideals from the days of Imperial Japan, that is a huge issue. Abe and Aso are among the top LDP politicians who are members of ultra-nationalist organization called Japan Conference - they have virtually taken over LDP and thereby Japanese politics. One of Japan Conference's top priorities is to stop teaching the future generations about its war crimes during WWII. That's equivalent of Germany stop teaching about Hitler and Nazism. Can you see the danger in that?

You call this a major scandal? Consider yourself blessed, Japan. In our scandal-plagued U.S. government, with multiple outrages being reported every day, a matter such as the discreet editing of a few real estate documents would probably go wholly unnoticed. If such an impropriety ever were to make it to media radar screens, it would be washed away in a tide of stinking swamp mud by the next day's news cycle.

It’s very simple. Which do you believe? The Prime Minister who has proven with track record, or just a fraudster? Also Koichi Nakano and Jiro Yamaguchi seems the professor but they are fraudsters too, they are no exceptions.

An earlier generation of Times reporters revealed how the CIA financed the far right in Japan post WW2, including Abe's war profiteer grandfather, effectively crippling what might have become a democratic political system. The fundamental story here is that American interference prevented the growth of a competent opposition. The current Tokyo bureau seems ignorant about their own paper's reporting history.

We can probably thank Donald Trump for creating an environment where, even in Japan, disgraced politicians no longer feel the need to resign in shame.

"Arcane land scandal" involving an "ultraconservative education group"? Nice attempt to gloss over the most important part of the story. What this case invovles is a very clear breach of Japanese law to support a fanatical war criminal worshipping school that basically preaches the type of Japanese cultural and racial superiority politics that resulted in Japans horrific wars of aggression throughout Asia that led to WWII. The scandal is not "arcane". It's that Abe directly or through his wife would support such a school that goes against everything the rebuilding of Japan after WWII was supposed to eliminate. Of course the political philosophy of the school is of a piece with Abe's goal of rearming Japan and a more muscular (read militarially aggressive) foreign policy. This despite the general feelings of the Japanese population which have been against Abe's calls for increased militarism and for Japan to play America's "deputy sherff in Asia". But, hey the US is always willing to not look to closely at geopolitically useful allies be it Japan or Saudi Arabia.

And people wonder why there's a crisis of trust in the political elites that is disrupting entrenched political systems across the developed world, one after another. And it's happening at a time when domestic and foreign policy challenges have never been greater.