In 2010, the Australian Broadcasting Company (ABC) launched a highly successful TV show called The Gruen Transfer. The title refers to the disorienting psychological effects produced on consumers by the architecture of shopping malls, whose dazzle and noise are deliberately designed to mesmerize: on entering, “our eyes glaze over, our jaws slacken… we forget what we came for and become impulse buyers”. The ABC's Gruen Transfer explored the weird, wonderful and disorienting effects produced by the advertising industry. Its most popular element was a segment called “The Pitch”, in which representatives of two advertising agencies competed to sell the unsellable to the show's audience - creating gloriously sleek videos to market bottled air, promote the virtues of banning religion, or advocate generous pay raises for politicians.

During his June 2013 visit to Poland, Prime Minister Abe Shinzo highlighted the crisis management of the post-3.11 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant as an argument for the sales and promotion of Japanese nuclear technology. A few weeks before, the French company Areva mobilized to promote cooperation with Japan Nuclear Fuel Ltd, Atox and Hitachi-GE during French President François Hollande's visit to Japan.

Is it time to bring Japan's postwar experiment in liberal democracy to an end? Prime Minister Abe Shinzo and his followers seem to think so. In April 2012, the LDP published a clear blueprint for constitutional revision that would go a long way toward achieving this goal.

The Liberal Democratic Party has advocated fundamental revision of Japan's Constitution since its founding in 1955. Nearly seven decades after the end of World War II, LDP leaders remain humiliated by the thought that the country is governed under a constitution largely drafted by a team of foreign military officers. Abe is working hard to build a coalition with the power to rip the “imposed constitution” out by its philosophical roots. He and his followers, who dominate the LDP, envision an “autonomous constitution” (jishu kenpō) that would radically adjust the balance between government power and individual rights.

Kitara is Sapporo's state-of-the-art concert hall in the middle of picturesque Nakajima Park. On 2 July 2014 I went there with different expectations than usual. I was not going to hear a professional orchestra playing a masterpiece of the classical repertoire, but an amateur choir singing a little-known choral work called Akuma no Hōshoku (The Devil's Gluttony), composed by Ikebe Shinichiro with words by Morimura Seiichi, a leading novelist. The piece was about Unit 731, Japan's infamous chemical and biological warfare unit located near Harbin in northeastern China (Manchukuo) in the years 1934-45, which murdered 3,000 people in gruesome vivisections and medical experiments.