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Abe caught out in school scandal

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Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his wife Akie in Tokyo, Japan (Photo: Reuters/Issei Kato).

In Brief

‘Growing scandal’ is the only way to describe the unfolding story about Moritomo Gakuen, a private education company in Osaka responsible for the controversial early education programs and schools currently under scrutiny in the Japanese parliament and press because of its close connection to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

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Videos from Moritomo Gakuen schools of kindergarteners in sailor suits singing martial songs at a Shinto shrine under the approving gaze of its head priest and first graders finishing a running race by raising their hands in a Heil Hitler pose have shocked many observers. But more startling is the link of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his wife Akie to the school.

Mrs Abe had publicly expressed support for Moritomo Gakuen’s Mizuho-no-kuni Elementary School, stating that it is ‘wonderful’, ‘remarkable’ and ‘fosters children to have pride as Japanese and a strong inner self’. Until Prime Minister Abe announced on 24 February that she’d resigned, Mrs Abe was also the school’s honorary principal.

The Japanese Diet is now debating the involvement of senior ruling party members — including Abe — in the deeply discounted sale of the land to the school due to buried waste on the site, and also whether Mrs Abe acted in a public or private capacity in her support of the school. Prime Minister Abe has deflected the issue with bombast, declaring: ‘I find it very unpleasant to have [my wife] discussed as a common criminal…If wrongdoing is discovered, I will resign immediately’.

While Mizuho-no-kuni Elementary School is still under construction, Moritomo Gakuen’s related enterprises offer clues to the ‘wonderful’ and ‘remarkable’ ways that its teachers indoctrinate small children. Viral videos first surfaced some years ago of kids screaming, ‘Adults should protect the Senkaku Islands and Takeshima and the Northern Territories! Chinese and South Korean people who treat Japan as a bad [country] should amend their minds’. They feature Mrs Abe wiping away tears of appreciation during a school visit.

So what is it about the Moritomo Gakuen kindergarten that is so telling?

The images of children raising Heil Abe salutes jar a majority of Japanese and people around the world because they signify everything that was supposed to be different about Japan from 1945 to the present. Worse, these are children doing what adults tell them to do.

Whatever word best captures post-World War II Japan — constitutional pacifism or secularism — Japanese society committed to negating the cult of emperor worship that drove the nation to catastrophic war, the end of the empire and a devastated homeland. The current Emperor Akihito eschews displays of personal veneration that invoke a time when the Japanese viewed his ancestors as divine. But in 1997, the political group called Nippon Kaigi (Japan Conference) emerged with the central aim of changing all this through policy and education.

Nippon Kaigi’s grip on national matters today extends beyond its 40,000 members. Sixteen of twenty current cabinet ministers are prominent participants or directors of the group’s various divisions. Its ranks comprise former prime ministers and incumbent Prime Minister Abe, leading Diet members and key regional politicians, bureaucrats, writers, media moguls and educators — including the owner of the kindergarten at the centre of this scandal.

One member, Minister of Internal Affairs and Communications Sanae Takaichi, appeared in the US State Department’s 2016 Human Rights Report as a central figure in the strangling of press freedoms in Japan. Takaichi has been key to the Nippon Kaigi’s Parliamentarian League section concerning ‘History Issues, Education and Family Issues’ since 2007. Abe is in charge of ‘Defense, Diplomacy and Territory’ matters, while Yoshitada Konoike, the Upper House parliamentarian whom the Moritomo Gakuen kindergarten owner apparently tried to bribe, heads the subcommittee on ‘Constitution, Imperial Household and Yasukuni Issues’.

Nippon Kaigi’s primary goal is to restore the emperor as head of state and rear future citizens to worship him — no female rulers need apply — through late 19th and early 20th century Shinto practices at special schools.

Added to this mix, on 5 March, Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party changed its rules to allow the head of its party a third term. If the scandal fails to break Prime Minister Abe’s stride he could run Japan until September 2021 and help to make Nippon Kaigi’s dreams come true.

Hopefully, open public debate will enable investigation of those involved in the scandal. Then, it should train its powerful — and democratic — lens on how the Moritomo Gakuen incident brings into relief the meaning of Japan moving forward.

For me, a ‘wonderful’ Japanese nursery school resides in one of Niigata’s less privileged areas — on a dilapidated shrine ground nonetheless — where my four-year-old found warmth and confidence, learned hiragana, and sang ’Totoro’ to his heart’s content regardless of what any of his teachers may have privately thought about who he was or why we were living in Japan. This, too, has every chance of being Japan’s future.

Alexis Dudden is Professor of Japanese History at the University of Connecticut.

14 responses to “Abe caught out in school scandal”

  1. For those readers who wish to learn more about Nippon Kaigi the article noted below provides a thorough summary of its history, ideology, etc:

    http://apjjf.org/2016/21/Mizohata.html

    One observer of Japanese politics noted in the last few days that Abe’s approval ratings have sunk to 36% when these were above 50% before this land scandal, etc struck. We shall see how far this investigation goes and what the political fall out for Abe and his LDP/Nippon Kaigi cohorts will be.

    • Richard,
      I just remembered. I quoted, in a comment of mine, a sentence from a British historian on loyalty in the Japanese conception to the emperor. “Japanese ultra-nationalists were loyal to their conception of what the emperor ought to be. To the emperor as he was they were grossly disloyal.”
      I would like you to read my two comments on Asia Unbound/Sheila Smith/Looking Ahead in Asia, With Our Allies, Nov. 30, 2016.

  2. “raising their hands in a Heil Hitler pose have shocked many observers.”

    Proper term in English is “Nazi salute.”

    What the kids are doing in the referenced video does NOT look like the Nazi salute. Their arms are vertical not at an angle. (See the many photographs of the Nazi salute available on the Internet or look at the Wikipedia article on “Nazi salute”.)

    The gesture the children are making in the video is the same one young children are taught to make when they are crossing the street. I live near several preschools in Tokyo and see young children making this gesture everyday. My two children did it when they were in preschool.

    • You are right.That is a traditional Japanese pose to swear fair play at sports tournament like Koushien(high school baseball) in general and has nothing to do with the Nazis.
      Dudden calls herself a Japanese historian, but it seems she does not even know such common sense or she might say that on purpose in order to accuse the children.

  3. Abe has nothing on himself to be blamed for the kindergarten or school scandal no matter how much one does not like his foreign or domestic policy.
    The educational content of Moritomo Gakuen is frowned upon and ridiculed even by conservatives.
    One of the things that are not mentioned here is that post-war Japanese education has been saturated with leftist indoctrination.
    Nippon Kaigi is not a politically powerful and strong organization. It is more like a club.

    On “the cult of the emperor worship that drove the nation to catastrophic war”: Hirohito was impotent like his father and grandfather. If interested in this blood of three successive generations, I will appreciate very much if readers read my five comments on Project-Syndicate. org/Nouriel Robini/Ground Zero in Asia.
    I quoted two comments, as follows, in my two comments on Sheila Smith’s article “Looking Ahead in Asia, With Our Allies”:
    Many people who are familiar with WWII history may think that the Japanese of the time were all solely fixated on going to war with the United States to win dominance in the Pacific, but (US) Ambassador Grew reveals that most Japanese acually wanted peace with the US (from Mark Thrice’s comment on Joseph Grew, Ten Years In Japan, amazon usa).
    General Tojo, the premier, had great power, but his authority in the Japanese government does not equal Roosevelt’s in the United States nor Churchill’s in England, to say nothing of Hitler’s and Mussolini’s dictatorships (Ben-Ami Shillony, The Politics and Culture of Wartime Japan).

    http://blogs.cfr.org/asia/2016/11/30/looking-ahead-in-asia-with-our-allies/

    • For those who are interested in a readable, fascinating and pretty comprehensive, albeit not terribly lengthy, account of why Japan launched the war against the USA in 1941 I would suggest that they read the following book: Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy by Eri Hotta.

      Ms. Hotta’s basic thesis is that it was the middle level planners in the military who pushed their generals into fighting this war when most of the latter did not really want to do it. This is because they recognized that the USA’s vastly superior resources would ultimately result in defeat. Per this book, Hirohito had an opportunity to oppose the attack on Pearl Harbor in the weeks leading up to December 7th (8th in Japan) but he was unwilling/unable to come out with a clear statement against it.

      • Richard,
        It is true that middle level planners or field-grade officers in the general-staff of Tokyo had much influence.

        I (Michi) sent several replies to Alan Dale Daniel’s comment on May 12, 2012, Good But Partisan, on Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover’s Secret History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath, amazon usa. I said in one of them, “I do not mean to say, ‘Therefore Japan was 100% right and the United States 100% wrong.’ What I would like to say is ‘Japan was not 100% wrong.’ The truth lies somewher between the two views.”

        I “encountered” Prof. E. Hotta at her commentary, The Ghost of Hirohito, Project-Syndicate org. Sep. 15, 2014. I sent a comment and said, “So, it is pointless to say that they fail to address some fundamental questions about the past.” She seems to want a guilty verdict for Hirohito.

        Hirohito’s grandfather dithered, so the government started war on Ching China without an imperial admission 1n 1894. He was reluctant again in 1904 about the war with Russia, but thinking it was his solemn imperial duty to approve whatever decision had been taken by the government, he nodded. But he said to his close aides, “This is not my war.” Hiroshito’s father’s imperial rescript was simly ignored in 1912. A Chinese general was assassinated by Japanese officers in 1928, but statesmen of influence chose not to let Hirohito fight the army because they saw the army was strongly united and determined not to hear any admonition, etc.

        Hirohito passed away on Jan. 1989. Asked to make a comment on him, Edwin O. Reischauer said he was probably the greatest emperor in Japanese history.

        • Richard,
          PS.
          The US-Japanese Pacific War cannot be well understood without dealing with it as part of a broader context and a longer perspective. A. Whitney Griswold,The Far Eastern Policy of the United States and Georg F. Kennan, American Diplomacy will make a good survey.

          Hirohito died on January 7.

  4. Please do some evidence-based research before publishing an article like this. The author should not naively believe in fake news or rumors.

    Abe and his wife have hardly anything to do with Moritomo Gakuen’s policies or its purchase of the school property. The school tried to use their fame to get donations. The school lists other renowned people’s names as supporters as well without their consent, and several people are furious.

    That “the cult of emperor worship drove [Japan] to catastrophic war” is not based on historical facts. In addition, Emperor is the symbol of Japan’s history and heritage. Worshiping Emperor is not very different from ancestral worship. The author should stop using the derogatory word “cult”.

  5. Something stinks in the Government land deal, sold for just one-seventh of its appraised market value to Moritomo Gakuen, to build an elementary school in Toyonaka, Osaka prefecture.

    According to the 14 March edition of the South China Morning Post:

    “Despite schooling kindergartners in views considered extreme, (Mr Yasunori) Kagoike and Moritomo Gakuen managed to avoid scrutiny, until a February 9 story in Asahi Shimbun. It revealed that Moritomo Gakuen had purchased a plot of government land in Toyonaka, Osaka prefecture, for its new elementary school for Y134 million (HK$9.06 million) last year, a fraction of the Y956 million (HK$64.65 million) estimated value of the land.”

    “Government officials told local media the 8,770-square-metre plot was sold for a cut price because it was contaminated with industrial waste and needed to be “cleaned up.” But it then emerged that the school operator had received a government grant to pay for the clean up, and Moritomo Gakuen had effectively obtained the land for free.”

    Mr Yasunori Kagoike, the head of Moritomo Gakuen, the group operating the elementary school, testified under oath in the Diet yesterday that he was “surprised at such a drastic and unexpected price cut.”

    The elementary school was proposed to be named the Shinzo Abe Memorial Elementary.

    Mr Kagoike also described how he came to receive a 1 million yen donation from Mr Abe, given through his wife on 5 Sept 2015 after Mrs Abe delivered a speech at his Tsukamoto Kindergarten.

    He testified under oath that “She told her aide to leave and there were only two of us in the room when she said to me “I’m sorry to have you by yourself. Please (take this), it’s from Shinzo Abe” and she handed me an envelope containing 1 million yen.”

    If his testimony is found to be false, Mr Kagoike could face up to 10 years in prison for perjury.

    Mrs Abe, who was to be the honorary principal of the new elementary school, that was eventually renamed after she voiced her objections, stepped down from that post after the land deal scandal broke.

    http://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/right-winger-surprised-by-land-discount

    According to a Reuters report “Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe repeated denials on Friday (March 24) that he or his wife had made donations to the head of a Japanese nationalist school at the heart of a political scandal that is chipping away at his support.”

    Opposition MPs are asking for her to testify under oath but, even without the testimony, if her finger prints are found on the envelope allegedly containing the 1 million yen then the game is over for Mr Abe.

  6. Alexis Dudden’s March 12, 2017 East Asia Forum essay is unfair and inaccurate. It is by that same measure a perfect summary of the state of American scholarship on East Asia.

    What is particularly insincere about Dudden’s piece is that, as South Korea collapses under the weight of the anti-Japanese assault carefully and patiently advanced by American university professors, she instead trains her attention on… a kindergarten. Did Dudden not hear? Anti-Abe politicking has so destabilized East Asia that there is nearly a war on. And yet she sees only a drummed up fake-news scandal about a school. Chinese and Korean nationalisms are pushing East Asia to the brink of disaster, but somehow it is a group of four-year-olds that has captured Dudden’s concern.

    Dudden thus practices the most strident denialism of all. In this hypocrisy we have the very essence of the New Orientalism: rich white liberals from East Coast academic perches telling Asians what to do, and then exempting themselves from the consequences by directing attention elsewhere. The comfort woman nonsense that the Columbia-trained camarilla in the US academy has been peddling is providing very little comfort to South Korea now, but never mind. Dudden has already moved on.

    For the sake of argument, though, let us take Dudden at her word and believe that she really does fear that foreign children won’t be welcome at Japanese schools. In my storied career, I have actually had occasion to work at Japanese kindergartens, elementary schools, and middle schools. Several of each, in fact. There were students from Africa, North America, the Philippines, and other parts of East Asia. They were as warmly embraced by each school’s faculty and staff as was any other Japanese child. I never once witnessed or heard tell of a single unkind word or action directed at anyone, parent or child alike, on the basis of race or nationality. Never.

    What is worse about Dudden’s hit piece is that she completely ignores the reality of bullying. I know Japanese students in other countries who are routinely threatened and ridiculed by others because of the kind of anti-Japan hatred that Dudden and her fellow US academics have now made their métier. Speaking of racial intolerance, perhaps Dudden’s next essay can focus on what has happened to schoolchildren in Tibet or Xinjiang—if she can find any left. In South Korea, Japan hatred has been so thoroughly perfected, thanks in no small part to denialists and revisionists like Dudden herself, that it forms the very foundation of politics and “scholarship”. The Japan-hate is now rending the South Korean social fabric in two—a resounding success for American academia and the leftist political forces which shape it.

    It is to the East Asian Forum’s great shame that they allowed to pass through the editorial weir Dudden’s claim that children were giving a “Heil Abe” Nazi salute to the Japanese prime minister. Dudden last year insinuated that wartime Japan was the equivalent of Boko Haram. But she has gone further here—something I hardly thought possible—by insinuating that Abe Shinzō is akin to Adolf Hitler.

    Children in many other countries are taught civic pride, while somehow only Japan is targeted for sins of “nationalism”. As a young American, I used to recite the Pledge of Allegiance daily at the insistence of my schoolteachers. Americans routinely sing the national anthem before sporting events of all kinds. In South Korea, many assemblies and symposia also begin with the national anthem, everyone standing up and respectfully facing the Korean flag. What does Dudden make of all of this? Anodyne patriotism, or something much more sinister? Does Godwin’s Law apply here, too?

    Just last week, in fact, in downtown Tokyo, I saw a group of kindergarteners on a field trip, dressed in their pink and blue smocks and tended dutifully by their teachers. As the children crossed the street, they all raised their hands so the cars could see them—but perhaps, as Dudden would have us believe, the children were actually on their way to a meeting of the Hitler Youth. To put it this way makes clear the depths to which the American academy has sunk.

    In fact, the leftists who have hijacked the American Asian studies academy are now gathered in Toronto, where, perhaps, they are planning their next attack on Japan again using the Association for Asian Studies as their willing sponsor. What will it be this time? Another UN rapporteur sent on an “independent” mission to Japan (immediately before meeting with Alexis Dudden just one day after his return to the US)? Another series of open letters coordinated and signed by the Columbia cabal? Another invitation to Asahi Shimbun reporters to continue their Yoshida Seiji regurgitations on US campuses? Another threnody before a comfort woman statue while the television cameras roll and the donations pour in?

    Whatever the next development in the ongoing Asian Studies propaganda machine, I hope that the East Asia Forum will redeem itself by refraining from publishing any more of these comparisons between Japan and Nazi Germany. At some point, surely, sanity must return to the American academy.

  7. To say Japan was a totalitarian, fascist country like Nazi Germany because they fought, united by an alliance, on the same side in the World War II is tantamount to saying that America was a communist country like Russia or that Russia was a democratic country like America because the two fought on the same other side.

    Emil Lederer/State of the Masses: The Threat of the Classless Society is a classical work on fascism and Nazism, perhaps one of the few best, if not the best, treatises on the matter. It stimulated and prompted Sigmund Neumann to write Permanent Revolution. Lederer did not count Japan in as a totalitarian or a fascist country (Chapter 2); because it was not.
    In passing Lederer’s book has not lost any significance today in not only looking back on our recent past but also looking on and understanding the world we are living now.

    “But unlike the Italian and German cases, there was no dictator and the system was not the product of a well-defined, popular movement, but more a vague change of mood, a shift in the balance power between the elite groups in Japanese society, and a consequent major shift in national policies… (Edwin O. Reischaur, The Japanese).”
    “As the events of the early 1940s recede into the past, it becomes easier, especially for an outsider, to evaluate them in a more dispassionate manner. By doing so, one may discover that the wartime regime of Japan, repressive as it was, was very different from the totalitarian states of that time in other places. When one realizes how tenuous and frail democracy is elswhere in the world, and how strong is the tendency towards arbitrary rule, one may conclude by wondering, despite the undemocratic tradition and the pressure of war, a totalitarian dictatorship did not evolve there (Ben-Amy Shillony, Politics And Culture In Wartime Japan).”
    “Yet, if we compare Japan to other countries where political terror was in use, either by government or by rival political groups, we find that in Japan the actual number of acts of violence was relatively small. There was no mass terror in Japan as there was in Germany of the the 1930s. Political rivals did not assassinate each other, nor did the government liquidate its opponents. Except for communists, who were jailed, most dissidents remained free…Unlike Nazi Germany, Communist Russia or Kuomintang China of that decade, people did not disappear. No liberal lost his life because of his opinions. Liberal writers and politicians…were neither arrested nor exiled…Despite the great polical and social unrest, Japan in the 1930s remained a country of law and order (Ben-Amy Shillony, Myth and Reality In Japan Of The 1930s, in Modern Japan: Aspects of History, Literature and Society, edited by W. G. Beasley, Charled E. Tuttle Company, Tokyo, 1976. First published by George Allen & Unwin).”
    Communists were released from prison if they recanted their ideology. They were free from the nagging anxiety that their wives, sisters or daughters might be killed or raped or forced to work as prostitutes as in Nazi Germany and postwar South Korea. Only two, Richard Sorge and a Japanese accomplice, who engaged in the espionage for Moscow and sent Stalin the very valuable information of Japan’s decision of not going northward, were sentenced to death.

  8. I just remembered. I would like readers and people to read my (Michi’s) comment, American Humanism, on The Chinese Comfort Women, amazon usa. A former South Korean, now a naturalized Japanese says as I quoted, that rapes are about forty times as frequent in South Korea as it is in Japan and that South Koreans get away with very light sentences.

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