The Moritomo Gakuen scandal, which has followed the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his wife Akie since 2016, keeps resurging and haunting Mr. Abe like a recurring nightmare.

While the mainstream media remains silent about the recent political developments in Tokyo, the more serious press, which serves as a bulletin for the capitalist class internationally, describes a real political earthquake taking place in Japan.

Donald Trump’s latest threat, that North Korea would face “fire and fury like the world has never seen” if Kim Jong-Un’s regime persists in its aggressive rhetoric has sparked a frenzy of fear and speculation in the media over the possibility of this war of words turning into a full-fledged nuclear conflict.

Japanese society is in a deep crisis. After decades of economic stagnation, the political elite is making desperate attempts to revive the economy, at the same time as attempting to whip up anti-Chinese nationalist sentiment to shore up support. Yet, the recent mass movement against the reinterpretation of the so called “pacifist clause” show that the political system is reaching its limits.

The general elections in Japan, held on December 16, 2012, led to the victory of the right-wing Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), amidst the lowest voter turn-out in Japanese history. The ruling Democratic Party (DPJ) lost 173 seats and is now down to only 57. It only got 22.81 percent in the electoral districts around the country, a reduction of about 25 percent compared to the 47.43 percent it won in 2009. The LDP, on the other hand, got only slightly more votes than last time (43.01 percent compared to 38.68 percent) while it increased its number of seats from 176 to 294.

It is the worst disaster for Japan since the war, since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This triple whammy of a force-9 earthquake, a tsunami, followed by a nuclear disaster, has shaken the country to its very foundations. And the consequences of this multifaceted catastrophe are widening by the day.