Issue:
December 2024 | Cover story
2024 was a year of political and actual seismic shifts in Japan
The year began in dramatic fashion. As people settled down to a post-prandial snooze around the kotatsu on New Year’s Day, the Noto peninsula was rocked by a powerful earthquake that killed 282 people and badly damaged or destroyed tens of thousands of buildings.
Just 24 hours later, a Japan Airlines commercial jet struck a stationary Japan Coast Guard plane that was waiting at Haneda airport to fly aid to the quake zone. The speed and ferocity with which the JAL plane was engulfed in flames left live TV viewers bracing for a high death toll. Remarkably, although five of the six crew of the De Havilland Dash-8 tragically died, all 367 passengers and 12 crew aboard the JAL Airbus 350-900 disembarked safely.
Aviation experts hailed the quick-thinking crew on Flight 516 for overseeing what appeared to be a textbook evacuation, and passengers for following instructions, including mostly leaving their hand luggage in overhead lockers.
As petrified passengers watched flames lick the windows while the cabin filled with smoke, JAL flight attendants hid their unease and drew on every last detail of their safety training. According to the airline, 18 minutes passed from the moment of impact to the end of the evacuation, although it wasn’t clear how much of the time was spent physically getting passengers down evacuation slides.
Experts noted that JAL’s safety record was hard won. The airline was involved in the most deadly single-aircraft accident in aviation history – an August 1985 tragedy in which a JAL jumbo jet crashed into a mountain en route from Tokyo to Osaka, killing 520 of the 524 people on board.
The year in Japanese sport was dominated by one man: Shohei Ohtani. Twelve months after he became the most expensive baseball player in the game’s history when he signed a 10-year, $700m contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers, Ohtani has added World Series and National League MVP titles to his list of achievements, which include becoming the first player in MLB history to hit 50 home runs and steal 50 bases.
The man some regard as a kanpeki no hito (perfect person) won sympathy after his interpreter and friend, Ippei Mizuhara, was arrested on suspicion of stealing millions of dollars from the player’s bank account to pay off gambling debts to an illegal bookmaker. While Ohtani is keenly aware of the fine line between public interest and media intrusion – he is, accordingly, guarded about much of his private life – not even he could have predicted the response to his marriage announcement, with Japanese TV even cutting into regular programming to report the “breaking news”.
Who would bet against the boy from an unfashionable town in Japan’s northeast dominating the sports headlines again from the other side of the Pacific?
Tourist troubles
No one would wish to return to the eerily quiet streets and light consumer footfall of the Covid-19 pandemic, but some are struggling to cope with their polar opposite – overcrowding fueled by a surge in tourism to Japan.
The most conspicuous victim of “pollution tourism” is Mount Fuji, where local authorities introduced a ¥2,000 entrance fee and capped the number of daily climbers to ease congestion. Japan’s most famous peak also caused disruption outside a Lawson convenience store in Fujikawaguchicho, after badly behaved visitors descended on the site to snap Insta-perfect images of Fuji looming in the background.
Fed up with jaywalking and littering tourists, the local government erected a huge barrier to block views of the mountain. It removed the screen three months later but has not ruled out re-installing if visitors make a nuisance of themselves again.
A host of other destinations, notably the ancient capital Kyoto, have reported similar issues with tourists, a record 17.7 million of whom visited in the first half of 2024. Attempts to steer the visitors away from the well-trodden Tokyo-Osaka-Kyoto trail have had limited success, especially among first-timers who say a trip to Japan without seeing the temples and shrines of Kyoto would be unthinkable.
And there will be no letup. The Japan Tourism Agency estimates that the number of inbound visitors will reach 35 million by the end of the year, which means its 2030 target of 60 million annual visitors is within reach.
The tourists seem undeterred by Japan’s blistering summer heat. The country recorded its hottest summer on record after a sweltering three months marked by thousands of instances of “extreme heat”. Unseasonably high temperatures continued through the autumn.
The average temperature in June, July and August was 1.76C higher than the average recorded between 1991 and 2020, the Japan meteorological agency said. It was the hottest summer since comparable records were first kept in 1898 and tied the record set in 2023.
Extreme heat struck much of east Asia over the summer in a stifling reminder of the effects of climate change: more frequent and intense extreme weather and a higher risk to human health.
Justice, at last
Iwao Hakamada is probably unaware that he has become an emblematic figure in the debate about Japan’s death penalty. In September, a judge finally acquitted him of murdering a family of four, ruling that the evidence against him was probably fabricated.
But Hakamada, now 88, was not among the 500 people listening to the verdict in Shizuoka District Court because nearly half a century on death row has ruined his mental health. Instead, it was left again to his indefatigable sister, Hideko, 91, to put his feelings into words. “The phrase ‘not guilty’ sounded divine to me”, she said. “I couldn’t stop crying.”
Hakamada is only the fifth person since World War 2 in Japan to escape the noose by having a death-sentence reversed. Shizuoka police arrested and detained him for three weeks in 1966 without a lawyer after his boss was robbed and killed, along with his wife and two children. The killer set the house on fire and fled.
Hakamada signed a confession but later retracted it, insisting he was beaten and coerced by police officers. A panel of judges nevertheless convicted him of all four murders in 1968. Six months later one of the three judges resigned, saying the conviction haunted him.
That conscious-plagued judge, the police and prosecutors who sent Hakamada to the gallows are long gone, of course. So, it was left to the current chief of Shizuoka police Takayoshi Tsuda, to make a pilgrimage to the apartment Hakamada shares with Hideko in October. “We caused you indescribable anxiety and burden,” Tsuda said. “We are truly sorry.” The prosecutors in Japan’s most infamous contemporary miscarriage of justice, were more muted. Naomi Unemoto, the prosecutor-general expressed her “strong dissatisfaction” with the not-guilty ruling, though she had no choice but to accept it. In late November, the head of the Shizuoka District Public Prosecutor's Office, Hideo Yamada finally also said ‘sorry’.
The high-profile case has triggered a rare bout of hand-wringing about capital publishment. Japan and the U.S. are the only two G7 countries that still execute its own citizens; 144 countries have scrapped or suspended the death penalty. Is it acceptable to maintain it under such circumstances? wondered the liberal-left Mainichi Shimbun, which said Hakamada’s acquittal “should be turned into an opportunity to debate” the abolition of the gallows.
But prosecutors are unlikely to relinquish the nation’s ultimate sanction, and sections of the media back them to the hilt. “Society must ensure that criminals … face the gravity of their actions and prevent copycats,” the Sankei said in January after Shinji Aoba, the so-called Kyoto arsonist, was sentenced to death.
Every story needs a hero - or a heroine. Hideko Hakamada was just 33 when her life was upended by her brother’s conviction and she fought for 58 years to prove his innocence. Effectively, she put her own life on hold to free him from prison, visiting him every month, even when he refused to meet her for years. “Your family do not give up on you,” she told him.
In August, she told the FCCJ she was fighting for all those who have been falsely accused, and singled out the Japanese media’s over-reliance on information leaked by prosecutors. The inevitable miscarriages of justice were quickly glossed over by the media and the political class.
Hideko told the FCCJ she had become a strong opponent of capital punishment. “For me, before, it was quite logical that the death sentence was appropriate in some cases of multiple murders, but Iwao’s case helped me realize how cruel and hard it is for the defendant and his family. I am now against the death penalty.” As for her brother, she told the Asahi Shimbun: “I can’t ask to bring Iwao back to who he was, because that is impossible. But I wish for his 48 years in detention to be put to some meaningful use."
Exit Kishida, enter Ishiba
In March, television producers used to covering the dull political kabuki of Kasumigaseki could hardly believe their luck when pictures leaked from a racy party hosted by a local youth chapter of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). Most entertaining of all was the organizers’ attempt to explain why male politicians had passed banknotes mouth-to-mouth with young female dancers dressed in their underwear. “We invited the dancers after studying from various viewpoints, including whether it matches the theme of diversity,” said Tetsuya Kawabata, deputy head of the Wakayama LDP youth wing.
The get-together did not “match the cabinet’s goal of diversity,” Prime Minister Fumio Kishida helpfully clarified.
The story was a bad omen for Kishida, reinforcing the image of the LDP as a sexist old relic of the Showa era. Fewer than one in ten of its lawmakers were women, and dozens of male politicians were simultaneously embroiled in a slush-fund scandal, in which they had received kickbacks from political fundraising parties. The LDP had also yet to sever ties to the far-right Unification Church. In February it emerged that the education minister, Masahito Moriyama, who was in charge of dissolving the church in Japan after it bilked thousands of followers, appeared to have been endorsed by them.
Unsurprisingly, approval ratings for the LDP and the government swooned. One by Jiji Press suggested the party was backed by just 14.6% of the public, the lowest in living memory.
Kishida wasn’t done yet, however. In April, he gave perhaps Japan’s clearest signal that the postwar era was over. In a landmark speech to U.S. legislators, Kishida said that Japan was ready to help America shoulder the burden of protecting the “free world”. Japan, he said, stood with its ally on a ship called “Freedom and Democracy”.
“I detect an undercurrent of self-doubt among some Americans about what your role in the world should be,” Kishida told a joint session of Congress. “This self-doubt is arising at a time when our world is at history's turning point. The post-Cold War era is already behind us, and we are now at an inflection point that will define the next stage of human history,” he said. “I am here to say that Japan is already standing shoulder to shoulder with the United States. You are not alone. We are with you.”
Kishida’s breathless speech capped what U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel called an era of “profound transition and transformation” in Japan’s military posture. “Driven by a proliferation of existential threats,” Emanuel told the FCCJ in January, Tokyo had committed to doubling its defence budget to 2% of GDP in 2027. That not only put it ahead of many NATO countries, he pointed out; it would give Japan the “third-largest defense budget in the world after the US and China”.
Moreover, he pointed out, the joint command of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces and the U.S. military for the first time in 2024 named China as a hypothetical enemy. In another first, Japan sent military equipment to a nation in conflict: Ukraine. And it eased its principles on defense equipment transfer by selling back American-designed Patriot missiles to the US. “Nobody ever imagined” such profound changes were possible, said Emanuel. “In fact, everyone predicted the opposite.”
Kishida may be remembered by the political class then as the man who helped drive the final nail into the coffin of Japan’s famous pacifism, but it wasn’t enough to save him from the public’s verdict. In August, with the cost of living rising and scandals lingering like a bad smell, he bowed to the inevitable. His decision to stand down for reelection as LDP president cleared the way for a September poll that boiled down to a two-way race between veteran conservative Shigeru Ishiba and hardline ethno-nationalist Sanae Takaichi. It was Ishiba’s fifth attempt to become LDP president but less than a month after taking office on October 1he was on the ropes. Gambling on solidifying his power base by calling a snap election, the LDP instead lost its majority in the Lower House.
Would he survive? As we end the year, the political knives are again out after the shy, awkward Ishiba was accused of fumbling his first two international conferences as prime minister. One widely circulated clip showed him fiddling with his cellphone as the world’s leaders back-slapped and shook hands, then failing to rise from his seat when Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau came to greet him.
As for the party he leads, some recalled 1993, when the LDP lost its majority for the first time since 1955. Yet, the party famously returned to power in coalition a few years later. Eyepopping scandals have come and gone. On the few occasions when the LDP appeared to be on the ropes (such as in 2009 when it lost to the left-leaning Democratic Party of Japan), it has rebounded.
It is clearly too early to write off one of the world’s most successful political machines.
In November came the not-entirely unexpected news (at least not to language teachers) that Japan’s ranking in English proficiency had fallen to a record low. According to the EF English Proficiency Index, considered the world’s premier index of English skills, Japan ranked 92nd out of 116 countries and regions, based on tests taken by about 2.1 million people. This despite decades of school reforms, billions spent on English-language education and the thousands of private juku and eikaiwa schools that dot Japan’s cities. What could be going wrong? A representative of the survey told the Japanese media that the problem might be not that English skills are declining in Japan, “but that the country can’t keep up with the growth in proficiency in other countries and regions”. That’s sure to alarm MEXT bureaucrats, especially the news that China ranked a notch above Japan at 91. Expect another raft of reforms.
David McNeill is professor of communications and English at University of the Sacred Heart in Tokyo, and co-chair of the FCCJ’s Professional Activities Committee. He was previously a correspondent for the Independent, the Economist and the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Justin McCurry is Japan and Korea correspondent for the Guardian and the Observer. He is the author of War On Wheels: Inside Keirin and Japan’s Cycling Subculture (Pursuit Books, June 2021), published in Japanese as Keirin: Sharin no Ue no Samurai Wārudo (Hayakawa, July 2023).
