Japan secrecy act stirs fears about press freedom, right to know

[bananas]

2. It is ominous - here's a Reuters Special Report from May: The deeper agenda behind "Abenomics"

http://in.reuters.com/article/2013/05/24/japan-abe-idINDEE94N01P20130524

Special Report - The deeper agenda behind "Abenomics"

By Linda Sieg, Yuko Yoshikawa and Tetsushi Kajimoto
TOKYO | Fri May 24, 2013 8:03am IST

(Reuters) - When ill health and political gridlock forced Shinzo Abe to quit after one dismal year as Japan's prime minister, his pride was dented and his self-confidence battered.

One thing, however, was intact: his commitment to a controversial conservative agenda centered on rewriting Japan's constitution. Conservatives see the 1947 pacifist charter, never once altered, as embodying a liberal social order imposed by the U.S. Occupation after Japan's defeat in World War Two.

<snip>

Abe's unlikely comeback was engineered by a corps of politicians who called themselves the "True Conservatives," many of whom share his commitment to loosening constitutional constraints on the military and restoring traditional values such as group harmony and pride in Japanese culture and history.

<snip>

In the spring of 2012, Abe's allies prepared for a run at the LDP presidency. Much of the groundwork was laid by the True Conservatives Association, now renamed Sosei Japan (Japan Rebirth).

<snip>

The special report is also in pdf format: http://graphics.thomsonreuters.com/13/05/JapanAbe.pdf

The pdf has some extra graphics and might be easier to read than the "wall-of-text" html format.