Fortress of Anti-Communism That Never Fell into Ruin

Postwar Japan Through Prime Minister Takaichi and Russia’s Strikingly Accurate Critique

We Japanese are accustomed to earthquakes, but these days it feels as though we have also grown used to seeing our prime ministers replaced one after another. When they change this frequently, both domestic and foreign commentators hardly bother to discuss it, and it is natural for people to feel that nothing will change anyway since another replacement is imminent. Even among those who loudly decry this as a “crisis of political distrust,” the reality is that it is not so much distrust as indifference—people simply no longer care.

The recent handover from Prime Minister Ishiba to Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae exposed once again that Takaichi, as a politician in the lineage of Abe Shinzo, pays no attention to the public. After Abe’s death, the Seiwa-kai (Abe faction), which had maintained a near-dictatorial grip on the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) for nearly a decade, collapsed amid corruption scandals and disbanded, seemingly quieting the storm for a time. Yet the remaining Seiwa-kai members could not bear watching their vested interests scatter, and what we are witnessing now looks like a coup executed in collusion with other factions.