One Sunday afternoon in early summer, a middle-aged man in suit and tie climbed on to a walkway above a Tokyo shopping street, delivered a speech denouncing the military policies of the prime minister, Shinzo Abe, and set himself on fire. You can watch it, if you have the stomach, on a shaky online video: the awful staggering lurch of the burning figure, the frantic efforts of the firemen to extinguish the petrol-soaked clothes. The incident was all but ignored by Japan’s mainstream media — even now, it is not clear who the man was, or even whether he lived or died. But contemplating Mr Abe’s smile as he celebrated victory in Japan’s general election on Sunday, this was the image that came into my
Abe is flirting with the dark side of Japan
We should be worried by the prime minister’s ambivalence about his country’s shameful past