So, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has chosen as Defense Minister a person who like him and a majority of the Liberal Democratic Party's members are war crimes deniers, historical revisionists and deniers of actual war time Japan's military history. Every August Tomomi Inada travels to Yasukuni shrine to pray for Japan's war dead. The fact that 14 class war criminals are also interred there seems to escape them. Reactions from South Korea and China are quite predictable as might expect having suffered tremendously under Japanese military occupation.
Party members like Tomomi Inada deny that the Nanjing massacre ever took place or that the imperial army had sex slaves and conducted unnecessary medical experiments on people of various nationalities and prisoners of war. The optics of these rather stupid positions seem to escape the LDP and its membership.
Tomomi Inada, a former reform minister who most recently held one of the top posts in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, replaced Gen Nakatani as defense minister. She's the second female to fill the post.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe changed more than half of the 19-member Cabinet in a bid to support his economic and security policies, as well as his push for a revision of Japan's postwar constitution.
While keeping the economy as the top priority for the Cabinet, Abe said he would do his "utmost to achieve the revision during his term," which ends in September 2018.
A lawyer-turned-lawmaker, Inada is one of Abe's favorites. She is a regular at Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine, which honors war dead including convicted war criminals, a gesture seen by neighbors as an endorsement of Japan's militaristic past.
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