Japan’s space agency has successfully launched a lunar probe. Woot! Hopefully this means the interminable technical problems with the launcher rockets are over, and Japan can get its whole space program back on track. I want my orbital love hotel!

In other local news, Abe is resigning. No, not Abraham Lincoln, I mean Prime Minister Abe (ah-bey). Everyone’s been expecting it for some time now, almost since he became PM after Koizumi. Put simply, he was always just a poor-man’s version of Koizumi, without the charisma and forcefulness and rock-star hair that allowed Koizumi to last so long as PM.

That’s something that had caught my attention long before I ever even dreamed of living in Japan: when Japanese politicians get caught screwing up, or even just honk the public off, they resign. They, like, take responsibility and just frickin resign. I always thought, wow, what an alien concept. American pols have to be hypocritical sponsors of anti-gay laws, caught soliciting gay sex in a bathroom, before they’ll resign. Even starting an unnecessary war without planning, and then ignoring history to mismanage it in the worst imaginable way, is not enough. Well, it’s enough to get rid of a few flunkies, but not the bosses.

This is not to say Japanese politicians are perfect–in fact, they’re just as corrupt as American politicians, if not moreso. But instead of hanging on forever and denying, denying, denying that they ever made any mistakes, once they see that they’re becoming a problem for their party and constituents, they just apologize and get the hell out. I can’t help but wish we’d take a lesson from that. Americans might not feel quite so cynical about the political process.