Ethics Newsline®

TOKYO
Shinzo Abe, the prime minister of Japan, has apologized and agreed to forfeit three months’ pay after it was revealed that he helped rig dozens of “town meetings” in which supposedly spontaneous comments and questions were rigged.

While the prearranged questions and comments occurred during the administration of former prime minister Junichiro Koizumi, Abe served during that period as chief cabinet secretary, the post supervising government-organized events, reports the Tokyo-based Daily Yomiuri.

An investigation determined that the posers were paid about $40 to ask simple, leading questions that would allow government spokesmen to promote government plans to overhaul the country’s educational and legal systems, according to the Times of London, which contends that “the town meetings were supposed to inject grassroots democracy into a political system driven by backroom deals and an old guard ruling party that has held power for decades.”

The Tokyo-based Japan Times blasted the affair in a weekend editorial, noting that some of the 174 rigged meetings cost hundreds of thousands of dollars each to produce.

In related news, one of the policies promoted during the meetings, enforced study of patriotism in public schools, was passed last week by the Japan’s parliament.

The Los Angeles Times reports that the law represents the Abe administration’s desire to eliminate taboos against expression of nationalism, characterized in the Times report as “a conservative volley in a cultural war over Japanese values. The education revisions … mark a victory for conservatives like Abe over what they view as a school system dominated by left-wing teachers unions.”

The new laws mark the first significant changes in such policy since World War II, when U.S.-influenced policy mandated that schools avoid the type of virulent nationalism that was apparent in the run-up to the war.