Word: abely
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...Ironically, the area where Abe has made genuine progress is the one that critics were most afraid he would mishandle: foreign affairs. Abe has quickly managed to rebuild Japan's fractured relationships with South Korea and China, traveling to both capitals for lightning summits less than two weeks after he took power. While Koizumi continually irritated his neighbors by visiting the controversial Yasukuni Shrine, which honors Japan's war dead, Abe tactfully sidestepped the issue by refusing to say what he intends to do about Yasukuni. "He's shown real success in dealing with this," says Koichi Kato...
...Abe has also been hurt by the ideological approach he has taken to education reform, an issue that does resonate with voters. This year more 12-year-olds than ever before took entrance exams for selective private and national high schools, their parents desperate to remove them from a dysfunctional public-education system. While conservatives worried about declining academic performance and motivation, a highly publicized string of student suicides last fall showed the extent to which bullying had poisoned Japan's classrooms...
...Abe's answer? Revise the fundamental education law to allow for greater emphasis on patriotism. Although a council he convened last month released more detailed recommendations, including increasing total class time, critics aren't impressed. Abe "doesn't address the real problems that Japan's education system faces," says the SDP's Fukushima, who notes that Japan still spends considerably less per student on public schooling than the O.E.C.D. average-forcing parents to plug the gap by sending their kids to private schools if they can afford...
...Abe has urged Japanese women to have more children (the current fertility rate is 1.29 children per woman), appealing to traditional family values while also promising to boost child-care support. But his administration has still managed to appear insensitive and out of touch on the issue. In a Jan. 27 speech exhorting them to have more children, Health Minister Hakuo Yanagisawa referred to Japanese women as "baby-making machines." The minister quickly apologized, but Abe's critics seized on the incident-and on Abe's refusal to fire Yanagisawa-as evidence that the administration can't handle the demographic...
...enough to make a dent in the demographics. And that puts pressure on the Prime Minister to figure out a more creative way to augment the country's declining workforce, not least by promoting immigration, expanding labor participation by women and the elderly and improving worker productivity through innovation. Abe clearly recognizes that this has to be a priority. In his campaign book, Towards a Beautiful Country, he writes that Japan should be "seen by people around the world as a place where they want to come and work." In a Jan. 26 policy speech to the Diet, Abe announced...