Thread by @David_Leheny

It’s fair to say that I was troubled a couple of weeks back at some of the fanfic written about new Prime Minister Suga Yoshihide here on Twitter, noting him to be a hardscrabble fighter for reform. This story should trouble everyone in academia. www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/ne…

The Science Council of Japan is one of the more laudable institutions in the country’s government, by law including hundreds of appointed specialists from across disciplines to provide guidance and expert opinion to the government on important matters of the day.

Needless to say, the government is free to ignore its suggestions, but institutionalizing the provision of expertise from researchers is at least one way to ensure that policy-relevant knowledge based on research gets a public hearing. It’s a good thing. scj.go.jp

In an apparently unprecedented move, Prime MInister Suga seems to have directed six nominees to be excluded from the Council, all of them specialists in the humanities or social sciences, apparently because of their criticism of the Abe administration’s security policies.

I take this deeply personally, because one of the excluded scholars is my friend Uno Shigeki, a political theorist at the University of Tokyo’s Institute of Social Science. And I can think of few scholars as brilliant, decent, thoughtful, and temperate as Professor Uno.

Professor is hardly a bomb-throwing radical. He’s a theorist of democracy who focuses largely on civil society and its role in supporting democratic institutions, building from Tocqueville, Mill, and other writers on community. Here’s his statement: tokyo-np.co.jp/article/59264

Obviously Professor Uno’s career isn’t threatened by this. While not a household name — he doesn’t seek the limelight and isn’t a regular fixture of TV — he’s a widely respected, tenured scholar at Japan’s most prestigious university.

But what worries me is what this potentially signals about Suga. I’ve been trying to figure it out. Is it just personal vindictiveness? That’d be bad enough, but Suga seems too crafty for that. Is he threatened by these scholars? Maybe, but doubtful.

What would worry me is if he were to be trying to take a page from the right-wing populist playbook and to make an enemy of academic experts with the temerity to criticize government behavior. I’m not sure that’s his goal, but I’m coming up short on other options.

Just to say that the next time I hear from an academic colleague about how Suga’s bravely reforming the economy, or showing commitment to the US-Japan alliance, or how he’s a self-made man who toughed it out from his days at a cardboard factory, I’m going to remind you of this.

And I’m going to ask why any scholar should offer support to a prime minister who has — apparently on something of a whim, and on a matter of no obvious strategic necessity — decided to take a visible baseball bat to academic independence and integrity.