Popular accounts on Japanese social media can’t get enough of Elon Musk’s D.O.G.E (Department of Government Efficiency) and talk about dismantling bureaucracy. Politicians in the land of the rising sun have also been praising the initiative, in spite of a glaring lack of focus on violent and wasteful war funding.
Elon Musk’s recent White House speech about the problems of bloated bureaucracies has struck a chord with popular influencers on Japanese social media. “This is Japan!” Japanese nationalist X user Nihon Patriot declared in response to Musk’s statement that unelected bureaucrats should not hold power.
Musk, who said on February 11 that “if there’s going to be fraud it should at least go to Americans” criticized unelected “leaders” (such as himself, ironically) while correctly diagnosing the bloat of the American bureaucracy.
Blind praise for D.O.G.E from influencers, Japan’s political rulers
It is not only social media influencers like Nihon Patriot, and “seigihakatta” (who notes that Musk is talking right to Japan as well) praising Trump and Musk, but powerful political figures like Japan’s prime minister Shigeru Ishiba and Minister of Digital Transformation (DX), Masaaki Taira.
Just last week Ishiba met with Trump to discuss strengthening military alliances. The self-described “defense geek” PM has unrelentingly been squeezing the Japanese people for more military spending and investment in the US, even as the well runs dry of yen at home, and pensions for retirees and the elderly suffer.
For his part, DX minister Taira has been a vocal proponent of D.O.G.E from the start, saying in November that “We would like to follow up closely and incorporate it into Japan’s administrative reform.” In the midst of Ishiba’s unprecedented one-trillion-dollar investment goal in the US, and US artificial intelligence development, the Japanese PM has also ordered Taira to get to work on an active cyber-defense system for Japan, and plans have been drawn up to increasingly govern the populace with AI.
This spending has not been without controversy in the island nation, with many Japanese left wondering why so much attention and money are being pumped into overseas initiatives — especially by those vocal about government “efficiency.”
War and violence — where D.O.G.E goes rabid
A cursory glance at what Musk’s cartoonishly-named department has done so far (via the official website), shows that the U.S. empire’s massive military spending has not been addressed at all.
If anything, some nice bones have been thrown to people understandably tired of wasteful spending on so-called “woke” agendas like the gender debate and DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion)-related matters, and Department of Education spending has also been reduced. That is, according to the site.
To advocates of freedom and fiscal conservatives, this in and of itself probably seems well and good. But in the place of such cuts, there is no resultant monetary benefit or freedom made available, social tensions between people of various backgrounds are needlessly exacerbated via statist agendas, and the war machine keeps rumbling over the bodies and bones of the oppressed as it always does.
As multi-billion-dollar proof of this, Trump is now planning to send $8 billion in weapons to the government of Israel, bypassing a review process and continuing a controversial Biden-era initiative.
This happens as surviving Gazans are railroaded out of their homes so the bombed-out land can be turned into a “Riviera of the Middle East” controlled by the United States. How this is fiscally efficient, or how it will actually help to mitigate the Israeli state-funded Hamas terror group — and not just murder thousands more innocent people — seems to have escaped Elon’s attention, and that of the Japanese politicians and social media fanboys.
