New Japanese Tourism Minister: "Japanese don't like or desire foreigners. We are ethnically homogenous"

This from the cabinet of the new Japanese Prime Minister, Aso. Aside from the racism and backward thinking in an age when Japan has a plummeting birth-rate and desperately needs immigrants to replete it's work force, it's also astonishing in its sheer incompetence: This idiot was the Minister of Tourism.

He has been forced to resign. But my suspicion is that the only significant difference between him and the rest of the cabinet is that he was stupid enough to say something like this out loud. In 2005, the same guy (Nariaki Nakayama) said he was glad that descriptions of how occupying war-time Japanese soldiers kept concubines of "sex slaves" out of textbooks. The conservative new Prime Minister Abe knew exactly who he was appointing, and its likely that he and the rest of his cabinet reflect the same views.

In the past, Nakayama has already served as the transport minister and the Education minister in previous cabinets. The point? The "new" Taro Aso Cabinet is just the same old guys from the past shuffled around, doing and saying the same things. Aso is just another insider, and nothing has changed.

I'm really fed up with the Japanese government since Koizumi. Koizumi pushed some much-needed reforms in the extremely corrupt government system, putting an end to racketeering by Yakuza and heavily curtailing pork, but was eventually pushed out. Since then, 2 Prime Ministers have come and gone, each resigning after less than a year. The first, Abe, responded to Japan's serious issues by legally requiring school children to become patriotic through public education, as if singing the national anthem each day will solve anything. The second, Fukuda, faced opposition from the entrenched party interests for trying to push reforms, and became a scapegoat for all the country's problems in the public's eyes at the same time.

The new PM Taro Aso probably won't have trouble from the backrooms for trying to push reforms, because he is likely aligned with them himself. He is by far the richest man ever to become Prime Minister of Japan. His hometown is in Iizuka, near Fukuoka, and his family owns several businesses in this area. I suspect the construction businesses his family runs will be seeing a lot of pork soon enough.

With the exception of Koizumi, who more and more is beginning to look like an anomaly blip on the radar that won't be repeated, It's just more of the same, every time. The same political party, the LDP, has run Japan almost continuously for over 30 years, making elections almost a formality. The party chooses its leader, not the public, so everything goes on from the inside. And it's the same types of people, again and again and again.

When things go sour, they bring in new blood by getting a wealthy socially conservative, 70 year old man who thinks the answers to Japan's problems in the 21st century is to look to the past. When that fails...they bring in new blood, with a wealthy, socially conservative 68 year old man who thinks the answers lie in the past.

If that doesn't work? Well, there's a party insider who relatively young at 69. He's spunky, socially conservative in a tough way and knows how to get things done. You just wait, he's really going to shake things up!

EDIT: On the other hand, the new PM Aso did once say that he wanted to "make Japan the type of country that rich Jews would like to live in". Now, it's possible he just meant that figuratively, as in, just make it the kind of country they would like to live in, though he still wouldn't have any intention of actually letting them in.

But as perverse and sad as it sounds, if he meant it literally, it would actually be a pretty encouraging and progressive policy on immigration....by LDP standards, anyway.