Who next?:

The proximate cause of Japanese PM Shinzo Abe’s abrupt resignation last week may have been ill health, but a record of incompetence, corruption, and misplaced priorities had already made his departure inevitable. Abe’s year in power was marked by ministerial scandals, a failure to advance domestic reforms undertaken by his popular predecessor, Junichiro Koizumi, and an obsession with reviving Japan’s great-power status by alienating its Asian neighbours. Tellingly, Abe claimed to be resigning over a conflict with the Democratic Party.

But Abe’s obsessive nationalism wore out its welcome in Washington, just as it did with the Japanese public. Eventually even President Bush felt compelled to chastise Abe; the recently negotiated deal

for North Korea’s denuclearisation, Bush warned, was too important to be derailed by Abe’s hot-button demand that the North come clean on all the dozen or so Japanese it abducted in the 1970s. Japan needs to continue the reforms initiated by Koizumi, reducing pork-barrel spending, regulating bank-lending practices, and promoting growth. It also needs to cultivate good relations with neighbours China and Korea. Most of all it needs leaders who can overcome factional feuding and who have an ear for both the aspirations and the fears of Japanese people. — The Boston Globe