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I'm revisiting Matsuda's 2016 biography of Suga. It's longer and with smaller type than Suga's book so I'm not going to tweet quite as much about it, but I'll try to flag interesting nuggets.
In a section on his relationship with his mentor Kajiyama Seiroku, he notes that Suga himself said that one difference between Kajiyama and himself was that Kajiyama opposed constitution revision and he did not.
But Suga, Matsuda concludes, is "a politician of few words and it is therefore difficult to discern his true feelings."
Biography matters: asked by Matsuda why he became a politician, Suga says that he hated the idea of coming from a "migrant village" and being apart from his family. "A society with that kind of migration is ultimately the result of politics."
After a description of the terrain of Akinomiya, Akita -- Suga's hometown -- Matsuda likens him to Tanaka Kakuei, the last of a breed of politicians rooted to the native soil. Running theme: the lingering effects of being sundered from his ふるさと.
Next section moves to the Manchuria connection, starting with a settler community from Suga's corner of Akita -- roughly 250 people who committed suicide together in August 1945.
His father Wasaburo, a South Manchuria Railway worker, helped Japanese civilians escape as the Red Army approached before escaping with his wife and two of Suga's older sisters.
Matsuda takes a long detour into the tragic story of the Akita settlers, before bringing the story back to Suga. Hard to see his point, beyond the suggestion that Suga's native soil is figuratively haunted by these ghosts.
Yep, that's his point. At the end of the chapter, says Suga didn't know this history in detail, but he writes, "one cannot be freed of the past." This history is carved into the earth of his cherished native soil.
(Not entirely sure how much I buy this, but it makes for an interesting story I guess. And to the extent that the war figures in Suga's background, it's rather different from Abe.)
Chapter two, Suga's experiences as part of a generation that collectively set off to work in the big city.
The descriptions of the Akita countryside are making me miss Japan immensely. Matsuda offers a somewhat lengthy description of how one journeys from Tokyo to Akinomiya, and I can perfectly picture the trip north by Shinkansen and the transfer to a local, the mountains. 超懐かしい
After returning from Manchuria, Wasaburo resettled with his family (he was the eldest of 11), so Suga grew up surrounded by extended family.
On his father's strawberry farming: he grew "late strawberries" that sold at a high price for commercial use in cakes, etc. He was also involved in developing markets for the village's product in Tokyo and Osaka.
The point here is that Suga's connection to his hometown or his father's farming should not be elided into a working class or hardscrabble background.
Irony is that the commercialization of local farming and the shift from rice production contributed to falling demand for agricultural labor that led to Suga's leaving for Tokyo.
