Shinzo Abe rose to become postwar Japan's youngest prime minister by hewing to a conservative, nationalist agenda. He stood tough against China and North Korea and championed the right's touchstone causes on history.
But in the month that he has been prime minister, Abe, 52, has made a beeline toward the center, reaching out to China and South Korea as this region confronted North Korea's recent nuclear test.
He has made surprising, if grudging, admissions about Japan's militarist past, assuaging the regional tensions that emerged under his predecessor as prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi.
It is too early to tell whether Abe's month in power is evidence of an innate pragmatism, or whether he is consolidating his power before pushing a more conservative agenda.
Tenative praise
But he has reassured voters in Japan and officials in Washington, won tentative praise from skeptics in China and South Korea and unsettled the Japanese right.
Abe has made back-to-back visits to China and South Korea. Both countries had refused to hold summit meetings with Japan because of Koizumi's annual pilgrimages to the Yasukuni shrine, the Shinto memorial for Japan's war dead and war criminals that some consider a potent symbol of Japanese militarism in Asia.
Japan's deteriorating relations with China had government officials and policy makers in Asia and the US worried. Both sides had reached an impasse, with Beijing saying it would not meet Koizumi unless he stopped visiting the shrine, and Koizumi insisting that he would not stop.
Abe, a longtime staunch defender of the visits, has now adopted a softer, ambiguous policy. Abe says he will neither confirm nor deny whether he has prayed at Yasukuni, while letting his aides inform the news media that he has, in fact, visited the shrine.
"His position on Yasukuni is a symbol of conceding to China and South Korea's demands," said Kim Ho-sup, an expert on Japanese-South Korean relations at Chung Ang University in Seoul. "He seemed hawkish, but after he became prime minister, he handled relations with Asian neighbors and issues like Yasukuni more diplomatically than Koizumi."
"His visits to China and South Korea were very successful," Kim said.
Michael Green, who handled Asian affairs at the US National Security Council until last December and is now at Georgetown University, said Abe has been "able to recast" Japan's relations with its neighbors away from Yasukuni.
"It was smart domestically because it reassured the center that he was able to deal with neighboring states," Green said. "It was smart internationally because it gave Japan leverage to deal with North Korea. It was smart with the US because, even though the US government wouldn't interfere on the history problem, the Japanese government could sense that there was growing unease in Washington about the state of relations between China and Japan."
Conservative base
Abe built a conservative base by leading efforts in parliament to revise school textbooks, which the right argues dwell masochistically on Japan's militarist past, and by casting doubts on the validity of the postwar Tokyo trials that assigned guilt to Japan's wartime leaders.
Starting in 2002, he rose to national stardom by being tough on North Korea and China.
But in the last month, Abe acknowledged that wartime leaders, including his grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, had "great responsibility" for the war and its damages in Asia. Abe said he accepted two landmark statements made by Japanese governments in the 1990s, apologizing to Asia for Japan's imperialist past and recognizing the Japanese army's role in drafting wartime sex slaves.
Biding his time
Hisahiko Okazaki, a former senior diplomat and a leading conservative commentator close to Abe, said the prime minister had not forsaken his conservative roots but was merely biding his time.
"Regarding policies toward the comfort women issue and other issues like that, he says they were established by previous governments, right?" Okazaki said. "Since previous governments set those policies, this government can naturally set its own policy."
Last April, former Bush administration officials, including Green and James Kelley, a former assistant secretary of state for East Asian affairs, said at a conference in Tokyo that Yasukuni was giving Japan a black eye.
Then Thomas Schieffer, the US ambassador to Japan, described as "very disturbing" the view of history presented at Yasukuni's museum -- that Japan was tricked into war by the US.
Now, Yasukuni officials said that they plan to change an exhibit that states that former US president Franklin D. Roosevelt forced Japan into war so that the US could recover from the Great Depression.
SEEKING CHANGE: A hospital worker said she did not vote in previous elections, but ‘now I can see that maybe my vote can change the system and the country’ Voting closed yesterday across the Solomon Islands in the south Pacific nation’s first general election since the government switched diplomatic allegiance from Taiwan to Beijing and struck a secret security pact that has raised fears of the Chinese navy gaining a foothold in the region. The Solomon Islands’ closer relationship with China and a troubled domestic economy weighed on voters’ minds as they cast their ballots. As many as 420,000 registered voters had their say across 50 national seats. For the first time, the national vote also coincided with elections for eight of the 10 local governments. Esther Maeluma cast her vote in the
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was