...the environment.

One worries that the events at Fukushima - which inspired so much fear and ignorance on the part of the anti-nuke sets - might have finished off the atmosphere once and for all.

Nuclear energy is the last best hope for the human race, whether there is enough intelligence to grasp as much or not.

Wonder what his platform is, and what recent events mean. The denial was reported here:

Japanese Broadcast Official: We Didn’t Commit War Crimes, the U.S. Just Made That Up

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1014&pid=722003

I doubt if we will understand why Japan is going far right, but the entire area - China, Japan and both the Koreas - are gearing up.

suspiciously big, actually.

It is pretty irresponsible to make a sweeping generalization just based on an event I know nothing about but could this be a formerly noted general pattern?

Namely that fear and crisis spurs the populace(suitably guided perhaps within and without the established power institutions) toward the right. Instability creates a manipulative opportunity. Radical groups who will "act" benefit the power groups who will react in a nice tango, bewildering to the innocent, that keeps reformers weak and less a "comforting" option with loads of win-win pretext to enable counter-intuitive conservatism and actually set aside accountability.

We know the second most dismaying thing about leadership world is the moronic evil in power is paired with the sorriest excuse for practical opposition. Otherwise the leadership in the US and Canada, to name just two, would have been thoroughly replaced with extreme prejudice with a minimum of law and accountability brought to bear.(The first most dismaying thing of course is leadership worldwide, totally inadequate if not totally counterproductive to the welfare of any life on the planet.)

Of course blaming the populace doesn't help much either. If not suffering the radiation damage immediately they think about the need for energy now with a real fear(post war misery) of what could happen in collapse. Politically it is always stupid or selfish or a set-up to divide the vote with the election institution(including public forums and media) already stacked against you(which I don't know how that works in Japan). There may be a lot of logical reasons for the results to argue against this as a good example of the pattern, so I can't really get too kneejerk about using this result.

It is the most alarming caveat that has to be repeated over and over. Elections with good results are not only not in the bag for extremely justified rational reform, they are poorly armed underdogs especially in "great" rich countries.