Stories about the recent series of ax murders have certainly dominated Japanese news over the last few days, and in particular the aniblogosphere has been in a frenzy over these events and their connection to the cancellation of School Days 12 and the postponement of Higurashi.

There have a number of other developments on the political scene that have also been rather interesting, however.

Lots of boring politics after the jump (and also some Rozen Maiden)…

As you may know, last week former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe unexpectedly resigned, causing a minor political uproar. He’s been hospitalized ever since his announcement, and it has since surfaced that his resignation was largely prompted by health concerns.

Many people expected current foreign Minister Taro Aso, nicknamed Rozen Aso for his well known fondness of the Rozen Maiden manga series, to be named as Abe’s successor. In the end, however, he was defeated by his opponent, the more conservative Fukuda Yasuo, in the 330-197 vote. Fukuda will officially take over as Prime Minister once he’s officially appointed by the emperor later today.

So what does this mean for us?

Fukuda is an interesting character. In one sense, he’s much more oldguard than Abe or Aso, fiscally conservative and holding very traditional values.

On the other hand, his motto on dealing with international affairs is “flexibility”, and he’s been surprisingly progressive in improving Japan’s foreign relations with its neighbors and with the U.S. Where Abe and Aso are pretty hardline hawkish, he seems much more interested in compromise and cooperation.

Specifically, he’s long been opposed to the Yasukuni war shrine visits which frequently sparked tension between Japan and South Korea and China.

He’s the son of a former Prime Minister, Fukuda Takeo, who served during the late 70’s. He also has strong ties to former Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro, previously having served on his cabinet.

Overall, he’s well connected and seems to have earned a great deal of respect from his fellow legislators, so we can expect him to quickly clean up the current political turmoil and restore some stability to the legislature. Hopefully he’ll also be effective at promoting bipartisan decision making, which is especially important right now given the current instability.

Really though, as far as most of you are probably concerned, it just means you won’t get to see this as the new Japanese flag any time soon.