Abe and History - The Kobayashi Yoshinori Interview

The recent controversy over Osaka Mayor Hashimoto Toru's statement that the wartime comfort women system was "necessary to maintain discipline" and "needed to provide rest to ... brave soldiers" shows that historical revisionism in Japan's public sphere is by no means limited to Abe Shinzo's Liberal Democratic Party. Abe is known to hold revisionist views and a firm belief that the current approach to history in Japanese education is "masochistic", but since the December 2012 election, he and other LDP elites have tried (not always successfully) to maintain voter support by skirting controversy and focusing on the "economy first" approach of "Abenomics" which has spurred a stock market boom and proven popular with the public

Archaeology · Oral history · History · Japanese History and Culture · Psychology