Japan had Trump before America did: Shinzo Abe, grandson of a war criminal, muzzled the press, bullied broadcasters, and faked statistics. Now Trump, the GOP, and Disney are replaying the script.

Japan had its Trump long before America did, and his name was Shinzo Abe. Back in 2014 and 2015, Shinzo Abe, grandson of a war criminal, and his backers successfully brought Japan’s largest media organisations to heel. They punished critical coverage with a ruthlessness that’s now being echoed stateside. Disney (ABC) recently suspended talk-show host Jimmy Kimmel’s program after attacks from Trump’s allies and the chair of the Federal Communications Commission (Brendan Carr) suggested he might revoke broadcasters’ licences.

This has all been done before. The Liberal Democratic Party of Japan, which is neither liberal nor very democratic, became a complete pawn of Abe, unable to resist him or stand against him after Abe came back as prime minister in 2012. He blamed the media for his fall from grace. So in 2016, almost a decade ago, Abe’s protégé and communications minister, Sanae Takaichi (now a frontrunner to become prime minister), openly threatened Japan’s TV networks with loss of their broadcasting licences if they were deemed “biased” against Abe’s government. She was essentially Brendan Carr in a dress. He and Sanae also turned Japan’s version of the BBC, the NHK, from a public television watchdog into a directly controlled lapdog of the state. By the time he was done, people joked that NHK was “Abe TV”.

Abe, like Trump, had imperial ambitions. He wanted to rewrite the constitution and strip basic human rights, popular sovereignty and pacifism from it. He planned to reinstate a pre-war constitution, that made the Emperor a god again, and allowed Japan to wage war. He wanted to erase Japan’s history of oppression and war atrocities in Asia and harness anti-Korean sentiment to solidify power. His second-in-command, Taro Aso, publicly suggested that Japan should learn from the Nazis and change the constitution while no one was paying attention. In the suggested “new constitution” that his party, the LDP, put forward, there would be an emergency powers act, that would let the prime minister seize control of the government in times of crisis. It was how the Nazis took power under Adolf Hitler.

It should be no surprise that many of Abe’s cabinet members, including Sanae, had sung the praise of a book entitled, “Hitler’s Election Strategy”, even writing laudatory blurbs for the book.

Abe blamed the nuclear accident at Fukushima on the Democratic Party of Japan, ignoring the role his own party had played in decades of promoting nuclear power as “absolutely safe”. He crushed his political opponents within the party and defamed the opposition leadership every chance he got.

But he took his hardest punches at corporate media. The pressure worked, and the effects were swift and severe. Japan’s three most prominent network critics of Abe were removed almost in unison in early 2016:

• Ichirō Furutachi was forced out at TV Asahi’s “報道ステーション (Hōdō Station)” after 12 years, later confessing to a sense of regret at how management gave in to LDP pressure.
• Shigeaki Koga, a former trade bureaucrat and outspoken commentator, was dropped from the same program after signs like “I am not Abe” branded him a government target.
• Hiroko Kuniya, veteran anchor of NHK’s “クローズアップ現代 (Close-Up Gendai)” — an amazing documentary series for over 20 years — was let go suddenly. Many viewed her ouster as payback for a tough 2014 on-air grilling of chief cabinet secretary Yoshihide Suga over state security legislation.
• Shigetada Kishii and Takako Zenba of TBS’s “NEWS23” were ousted after criticising Abe’s military agenda.
• Jun Hori at Nippon TV, another government sceptic, was also forced aside.

Behind the scenes, the LDP’s Information and Communication Strategy Study Group summoned NHK and TV Asahi executives, interrogating them over supposed bias. Newsrooms swiftly got the message – and cowered. The Liberal Democratic Party hired an advertising agency to attack on-line critics and demand that posts ridiculing or humiliating the ruling party be taken offline, creating an army of paid network trolls.

The Asahi affair and chilling code words

The pressure didn’t stop with TV. Before putting the screws on broadcasters, Abe attacked his most frequent critic, The Asahi Shimbun, again and again. The Asahi, Japan’s flagship liberal daily, faced relentless government and rightwing attacks over its Fukushima nuclear disaster and World War II reporting. It ultimately dissolved its investigative journalism team and publicly retracted key stories in 2014. Fear was infectious: “We found ourselves standing all alone,” confessed a senior Asahi reporter, Samejima Hiroshi.

Within newsrooms, silence became shorthand. Editors passed on government criticisms with a wink. Abe’s emissaries would make veiled threats to editors and company presidents, with an emphatic, “Do you understand?” – meaning, spike the story, or face punishment. At NHK, chairman Katsuto Momii — installed by Abe — bragged, “If the government says right, we cannot say left."

Regulatory menace as weapon

The most overt threat came from Sanae Takaichi. In 2016, she declared in the Diet that the government could revoke any broadcaster’s licence for “political unfairness” under The Communications Act. The Japanese Federation of Commercial Broadcast Workers Unions formally protested, warning the move violated Japan’s constitutional free expression. The tactic worked; nobody lost their licence, but self-censorship became ubiquitous.

Japan’s press freedom ranking collapsed — from 11th to 72nd — during the Abe era, as the 2013 State Secrecy Law, passed despite opposition from more than 80% of the public, criminalised the reporting of government leaks.

The heart of the rot: Falsified statistics and official deceit

But the damage didn’t stop at censorship. Japan’s Government, under Abe’s direction, systematically falsified key statistics – across labour, construction and overtime. Whether the government workers did this under direct orders or simply took it upon themselves, the way a low-level yakuza acts on the words of his boss, is not clear. In a brilliant move, in 2014, Abe extended this control of government and civil service appointments by creating a Cabinet Bureau of Personnel Affairs. “The bureau will serve as the secretariat for the prime minister to decide the appointments of about 600 elite bureaucrats at ministries and agencies of the central government, including vice-ministers and bureau chiefs,” wrote the Japan Times. In other words, if you wanted to rise up the government worker ladder, you had better do what Abe wanted or your promotion would never happen. As a result, the ministries began to tell him what he wanted to hear rather than risk his ire. All of this was done to prop up the myth of “Abenomics.”

Abenomics was Shinzo Abe’s magic trick for the economy – except the rabbit never came out of the hat. It was three arrows: easy money, government spending, and vague “structural reform” that never showed up for work. The Bank of Japan printed yen like confetti, the government shovelled cash into white-elephant projects, and the promised deregulation stayed mostly on the back of the napkin. What it really did was goose the stock market, weaken the yen, and make life harder for ordinary Japanese as wages stagnated and inequality spread.

In short, it was the Japanese version of what George Bush once called Reaganomics: “voodoo economics". A plan that looked great in speeches, worked wonders for the wealthy, but left everyone else wondering why the future still looked like the past – only more expensive. But through sleight of hand and a compliant press, Abe managed to convince the world that the magic was working. But misdirection doesn’t work forever.

• The Monthly Labour Survey scandal saw the Ministry of Labour admit to manipulating regular wage, employment, and job statistics for years – resulting in at least 20 million people being underpaid, and casting doubt over Abenomics itself.
• A review showed that, of 56 core government statistics, at least 22 were “problematic”. Among the findings: agencies reported fictitious wage rises and productivity gains, fuelled by political pressure to show economic progress.
• In work-style and overtime reforms, cherry-picked and flawed data underpinned Diet testimony, ultimately forcing the government to retract or rewrite legislation when exposed.
• Construction data, too, were doctored — creating the illusion of booming infrastructure growth.

Abe eventually apologised in the Diet, but only after media exposés and opposition interrogation. Critics argued the magnitude of deceit was enabled by a divided, cowed, and complicit press corps – whose best journalists had already been silenced or driven out.

Meanwhile, in the US, Trump and his Cabinet have fired bureaucrats who don’t give him the figures he wants. They have purged the FBI of special agents that investigated Trump or pursued the criminals responsible for the 6 January insurrection. The Inspector Generals, that monitor federal organisations for corruption and malfeasance at the Veterans Administration and other agencies, were fired en masse. Trump, personally, set 1500 criminals free, pardoned the creator of the world’s largest underground drug market (the Silk Road), and released an international hacker back to Russia – one who stole hundreds of millions of dollars (Alexander Vinnik). He is currently trying to force out Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve Board. In short, Trump punishes his enemies, silences his critics, and rewards his cronies.

Abe would applaud his methods – if he were still alive.

America’s reflection: Trump’s mirror

This climate — where truth could be manufactured or erased — became a model for Steve Bannon and Trump’s inner circle. Bannon called Abe the “precursor to Trump”, openly admiring his use of regulatory and legal pressure. When Trump sought to threaten network licences, neuter “60 Minutes,” and sideline critics like Kimmel, he was following Abe’s script. The lawsuit against The New York Times, and efforts to pressure and purge critics, come straight from the “Abe playbook”.

When Abe visited Trump Tower in late 2016, he reportedly quipped, “Donald, I vanquished the Asahi. When are you going to do it to The New York Times?”

Donald, perhaps haunted by the Ghost of Abe, certainly seems to be trying now.

Legacy and lesson

By the end of the Abe years, public faith in both the media and official numbers was shattered; cynicism, corruption and the normalisation of lying filtered into every corner of Japanese governance. According to a Nikkei survey in 2019, 80% of the public said they no longer believed government statistics. The yen is a fraction of its value compared to what it was in 2019 and Japan’s economic downturn shows no signs of stopping. Prices are rising and actual wages are declining. The legacy of Abenomics is that almost everyone — except for Abe’s cronies — are poorer and worse off than they were. Trumpenomics is going to do the same.

Today, one of the architects of this environment — Sanae Takaichi — a great lover of Abe and Abenomics, is again close to the prime minister’s chair.

If America wants a preview of where unchecked executive war on truth leads, it should look to recent Japanese history: direct threats, vanishing whistleblowers, a devalued currency, millions shortchanged by fabricated data, and the ghost of real reporting haunting hollowed-out newsrooms. Japan pioneered the playbook. Trump only refined it.

The question now is whether American democracy can see its reflection before the last newsroom light goes dim.

Abe’s crushing of the press laid the groundwork for Japan’s current malaise. The consequences were brutal. Inequality widened. Corruption went unchecked. The yen sank to historic lows. Japan now leans on tourism like a crutch, wages remain stagnant, poverty deepens and nationalism fills the void. All because one man was allowed to rule without challenge.

For Americans, the warning is clear. Trump and Abe were close allies, and Trump seems to have studied Abe’s playbook. He learned the worst lesson of all: how to bully the press into silence, forge his own “truth”, and weaponise nationalism against accountability. The US risks ending up in the same place Japan now finds itself –economically weakened, socially divided, and politically cowed.

And Abe’s end should not be forgotte n. He was assassinated — not for his policies, but for shielding a foreign religious cult that exploited its own members — the Unification Church. It could be argued that years of protecting a movement tied to a foreign leader, South Korean Reverend Moon —  who once compared Japan to a vagina and Korea to a phallus — cost him his life. The parallel should make Americans shiver. Abe had risen to power as an ultranationalist but was taking marching orders from a Korean cult leader who looked down on Japan and considered the Japanese public to be sheep ripe for shearing. What Abe was to the Unification Church, many would argue Trump is to Putin. In any country, a powerful autocratic leader with loyalties outside his own people is a danger few democracies can survive.

Japan’s experience should serve as America’s cautionary tale. Ignore it, and the outcome will be the same: a country diminished, a democracy hollowed out and a people left wondering how they lost control.

Republished from Tokyo Paladin with Jake Adelstein Substack, 19 September 2025

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.