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.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of
A prominent Christian leader has allegedly been stabbed at the altar during a Mass yesterday in southwest Sydney. Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel was saying Mass at Christ The Good Shepherd Church in Wakeley just after 7pm when a man approached him at the altar and allegedly stabbed toward his head multiple times. A live stream of the Mass shows the congregation swarm forward toward Emmanuel before it was cut off. The church leader gained prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic, amassing a large online following, Officers attached to Fairfield City police area command attended a location on Welcome Street, Wakeley following reports a number