Following Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s resignation, this article examines the extraordinary burden imposed on Japan’s prime minister by prolonged attendance at Diet and Budget Committee sessions. Drawing on historical comparisons with France, Britain, and Germany, it addresses the physical toll of all-day committee appearances, early-morning preparation, and the conduct of opposition parties, NHK, the Asahi Shimbun, and others.

September 3, 2020
Immediately before Prime Minister Abe resigned, NHK’s “News Watch 9” invoked Germany and Merkel in order to criticize him with unsurpassable malice.
When I sometimes watched televised sessions of the House of Representatives Budget Committee with a friend who is an exceptionally avid reader, he would invariably say, with an expression of irrepressible indignation, “I am worried about Prime Minister Abe’s health. It is only natural that the number of times he has to appear in a place like this should be reduced. There is something completely wrong with Japan when it forces the most outstanding statesman in the world today to answer the foolish questions of such foolish people.”
Naturally, I felt this even more strongly.
If the prime minister is made to waste his time in a place like this, the “Turntable of Civilization” cannot advance.
The Asahi Shimbun and other newspapers, NHK, and the so-called intellectuals who agree with them have repeatedly told Japan to “learn from Germany.”
They have employed exactly the same rhetoric as South Korea’s anti-Japanese propagandists.
It may even have been a collaborative undertaking.
When Prime Minister Abe truly succumbed to illness and announced his resignation, I thought about the behavior of opposition politicians who attacked him before the television cameras in the House of Representatives Budget Committee, the behavior of NHK, and the more fundamental question of why the prime minister should be required to attend such Budget Committee sessions at all.
The number of his appearances had to be drastically reduced.
For some reason, information concerning this matter did not readily appear in search results, but the realities in countries other than Japan proved that my doubts had been correct.
Germany, in particular.
The Asahi Shimbun and the other newspapers, NHK, and the so-called intellectuals—you are the ones who must learn from Germany!
The following is taken from the Imidas article “The Act on the Revitalization of Diet Deliberations.”
The preceding passage is omitted.
“It presented data concerning the number of days on which the prime ministers of various countries attended parliament or spoke in parliament: Japan’s prime minister attended the Diet on 127 days from January to December 2011; the French prime minister spoke in parliament on 12 days from July 2007 to July 2008; the British prime minister spoke in parliament on 36 days from December 2008 to November 2009; and the German chancellor spoke in parliament on 11 days from November 2009 to November 2010.”
An intervening passage is omitted.
“In these data, the figure for Japan represents the number of days on which the prime minister attended the Diet, while the figures for the other countries represent the number of days on which their leaders spoke in parliament, meaning days on which even a single parliamentary statement was recorded. In Japan, however, when the prime minister attends a Budget Committee session or a similar meeting in either chamber of the Diet, he is normally required to remain there from 9:00 a.m. until 5:00 p.m.—seven hours after excluding the one-hour lunch break. If the comparison were made in terms of the total number of hours for which leaders are kept in parliament, the extent to which Japan’s prime minister is constrained would appear even more extreme. Furthermore, when a committee meeting begins at 9:00 a.m., the prime minister must rise at 5:00 a.m. and devote himself to preparing answers. The burden is extraordinary.”
The remainder is omitted.
Source: https://imidas.jp/genre/detail/C-102-0603.html