There was a half upper house election in Japan over the weekend. Abe and his coalition partners have won.

  • And it looks like the winning team might have scored big enough to have a 2/3 'super majority' in the upper house
  • If they do get this it will make constitutional reform much easier for Abe
  • But his coalition partners are quite cool on his ideas, so any movement on such reforms will be slow

Concerns have been expressed that Abe switching his efforts to getting constitutional reform would mean he will be paying less attention to efforts to boost the economy. Err, and that would be a bad thing, would it? :-D

I won't get into the nitty gritty of Japanese politics, here are some pieces from the Nikkei if you'd like to: