Abe School Scandal Set For Major Escalation After Donation Receipt Emerges
by Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge.com
Mar 19, 2017
The crisis that has rocked the previously unshakeable administration of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is not the result of bungled economic policies, party in-fighting or any of the other calamities that have brought down Japanese leaders in the past, which includes Abe’s first administration as prime minister. Abe is struggling to shake off a scandal involving a kindergarten.
As the SCMP recently reported, just a few weeks ago, Abe was riding high in the polls and making plans to run for an unprecedented third term as head of the dominant Liberal Democratic Party. So when questions first began to be asked about Moritomo Gakuen, a kindergarten operator in Osaka with what was initially described as a conservative curriculum, the prime minister felt confident to declare that he shared many of the philosophies of the school’s president, Yasunori Kagoike.
It would emerge in swift succession last month that the premier’s wife, Akie Abe, had been named honorary principal of a new school being planned by Kagoike; that the school was being built on land purchased from the government by Moritomo Gakuen for a fraction of its estimated value; that Abe’s wife Akie allegedly donated 1 million yen ($8,800) to the foundation in September 2015 on behalf of her husband (they both deny it), and that the operator’s philosophies imposed upon his young pupils were not just conservative, but tended towards far-right pre-war nationalism.
The Rest…HERE
