JAPAN:The scandal-hit government of Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe has been dealt another blow with the resignation yesterday of defence minister Fumio Kyuma after he apparently defended the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Mr Kyuma, who is from Nagasaki, infuriated survivors of the 1945 bombings when he said at a weekend speech that he thought the bombings "couldn't be helped" and had saved Japan from Soviet invasion at the end of the second World War.
The two bombs killed more than 200,000 people, reduced both cities to ashes and caused cancers and other illnesses in thousands of survivors. Every year Hiroshima and Nagasaki add to the list of victims.
Nagasaki nuclear bomb survivors responded by banning Mr Kyuma from attending the city's annual peace ceremony and sending Mayor Tomihisa Taue on an official protest to Tokyo.
"I am flabbergasted at the low level of Mr Kyuma's historical understanding," said one Nagasaki official yesterday.
Mr Abe distanced himself from the comments and publicly dressed down his minister. But with the opposition preparing a formal demand for his resignation and national elections looming at the end of this month, the embattled defence minister decided to step down.
"I didn't want this to have an impact on the House of Councillors election. That was what I was most concerned about," he told reporters. "I told Prime Minister Abe, 'I'm sorry, but I must take responsibility and resign'." The government immediately announced that Mr Abe's hawkish national security adviser Yuriko Koike would replace him.
The resignation comes at a dangerous time for Mr Abe's government which is reeling from a series of scandals and low public approval rates ahead of the July 29th elections.
A weekend opinion poll put support for his cabinet at below 30 per cent for the first time since he took office last September, making him the most unpopular leader since Yoshio Mori, widely considered one of Japan's worst post-war prime ministers when he resigned in 2001.
The prime minister is accused of badly mishandling a pension funds scandal that has resulted in the loss of data on 50 million pension payments. Despite emergency parliamentary measures to deal with the chaos, millions of people are convinced that their pensions will be cut.
In May, agriculture minister Toshikatsu Matsuoka committed suicide after accusations that he had claimed exorbitant expenses for his rent-free office. Many believe that expense-account padding is rife among government bureaucrats and that Mr Abe has done little to stamp it out.
Mr Abe has also courted unpopularity by using his ruling bloc majority in parliament to ram through a series of controversial Bills with a minimum of debate.
New legislation written since September by the ruling Liberal Democratic Party/New Komeito coalition has laid the ground work for potentially far-reaching changes to education, defence and the constitution. The government ignored opposition demands for more debate on these issues nearly 20 times, according to the Asahi newspaper, "an unprecedented record of steamrolling".