Japan is enduring a rare bout of “divided government”, where the powerful lower house of the Diet is controlled by the usually-ruling Liberal Democratic Party (center-right defense hawks) in coalition with the New Komeito Party (liberal pacifists, and I mean liberal in the traditional sense, not the post-New Deal American sense), but the upper house is controlled by the Democratic Party of Japan (social democratic pacifists).
Having just taken a page from the Democratic Party of America playbook and boycotted for a week, the returning upper house has now rejected the LDP nominee for Governor of the Bank of Japan, despite the outgoing Governor’s term ending on the 19th. The DPJ is risking the BOJ having no leadership (just as the Federal Reserve was without leadership in 1929) in order to get back at the LDP for taking advantage of little-used Constitutional provisions to ram through a tax and budget reform bill.
When I look at Japanese politics, with their teachers who sue over being forced to sing the national anthem, demanding secular Prime Ministers, and all that other lefty mischief of the kind we see here in America, I wonder if we made a mistake giving them the Constitution we gave them. I hope it’s enough protection from the left.