Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s ruling LDP party has handily won this past weekend’s snap elections, which also show some veteran opposition figures getting trounced.  The head of the #2 Democratic Party of Japan lost his race and will reportedly step down as party leader.

Abe and his coalition partner the Komeito Party got a supermajority of more than two-thirds of the seats in the lower house of The Diet.  That will allow Abe to ram through his “Abe-nomics”, a policy mix of radical monetary easing, fiscal stimulus and structural reform vows.  Recognizing that the growing income gap is hurting Japan, there’s some talk of Abe talking with business leaders about boosting wages.

But that supermajority also allows Abe to pursue his nationalist agenda, especially dropping the official pacifism of Japan’s US-written, post-war constitution.  Abe comes from a school of thought that sees China’s growing military as an imminent threat and he has long wanted Japan to take part in combat operations with the US and western allies. 

The other winner is the Japan Communist Party.  The Communists’ pacifist, anti-nuclear platform stood in stark contrast to the center and right parties.  The JCP went into the elections with eight seats in The Diet, and came out with 21 – more than doubling is seats, and securing enough to allow it to submit legislation to parliament.

To understand the lay of the land, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) is roughly the equivalent of Australia’s Liberals.  Komeito is a minor party that is the political wing of the conservative Buddhist Soka Gakkai sect.  The Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) is sort of like Labor, but perhaps is more similar to the US Democratic Party of Barack Obama.  Except without a charismatic leader.  In fact, one could argue that no party had any charisma whatsoever, since voter turnout was a dismal 52 percent – a record low .

DPJ leader Banri Kaieda failed to win his home district seat, and will resign as party leader.  Also losing his home election is former Prime Minister Naoto Kan – who was in office for the horrible year that included the 11 March 2011 Earthquake and Tsunami disaster that caused the triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, a crisis that is still going on today (despite no one talking about it).  But Kan manages to stay in The Diet through a quirk in Japan’s Byzantine election law that allows some candidates a second chance at election via proportional representation rather than directly representing a district.

“I’d like to do my best to realize my election pledge to stop nuclear energy and the dangerous Abe government,” said Kan, a humbled candidate who left his near-empty campaign office in the dead of night without the tradition “banzai” shout that goes along with winning.

Another notable loser is Shintaro Ishihara, the long-time nationalist provocateur who co-authored the infamous 1980s best seller “The Japan That Can Say No”.  Some accuse the bombastic Ishihara of enflaming the current dispute with China over the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea.