In life, former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe divided public opinion, but after his shocking assassination on the campaign trail on Friday, all thoughts can be united on at least one thing: He was a patriot who gave everything for Japan to the moment of his death. His absence will weigh heavily on the country he leaves behind.
Abe was the most consequential Japanese politician of his generation. In office, he not only served longer than any other prime minister, but he left behind a legacy of changes in a nation where political gravity is anchored to the “status quo.”
While the totality of his eight years in office could not live up to the extraordinary first few years of his second term, he will go down in history as a political giant.
Abe’s desire for change attracted suspicion over his motives. In particular, many were turned off by the patriotism epitomized in his 2006 book, Towards a Beautiful Country. Shortly after its publication, Abe became Japan’s youngest postwar prime minister and the future seemed bright.
After a year in office, Abe’s beautiful country did not quite materialize, and he was out — brought down by low polling numbers, Cabinet scandals and his ulcerative colitis. He was confined, it seemed, to political irrelevancy.
That Abe not only fought his way back to the top, but righted the wrongs of his first term is perhaps the most extraordinary part of his story.
It would have been easy for him to coast — take a series of backroom Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) jobs and work behind the scenes. Instead, with new drugs helping contain his illness, Abe secured internal support when the party was forced into opposition in 2009.
His moment arrived three years later, when as party leader again, he goaded the Democratic Party of Japan into agreeing to a snap election. Soon he was back in office, rejuvenated and promising to “Take Back Japan.”
It was an extraordinarily active few years: Abe took the predominant post-bubble narrative of Japan as a washed-up nation and flipped it on its head.
He repositioned Japan as a geopolitical power. Having initially been treated with suspicion by the administration of then-president Barack Obama, Abe’s approach to China — a healthy mix of hawkish skepticism and realpolitik acknowledgment of its trading status — became what is now the backbone of Western policy toward Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) regime.
Abe worked to unite countries with similar interests in containing China, sowing the seeds of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, and bringing Japan so close to India that the country declared a national day of mourning at the news of his death. He also pushed to make Japan a more equal ally, spending extensive political capital to pass legislation loosening restrictions on the military.
Abe led a supposedly protectionist Japan into the Trans-Pacific Partnership, even as the US turned away. Despite initial public opposition, he saved the agreement after the two main candidates in the 2016 US presidential election turned their backs on the deal.
Domestically, his accomplishments are often underappreciated. While the “three arrows” of his “Abenomics” program failed to stoke the 2 percent inflation he promised while in office, his forceful use of the first two — monetary and fiscal policy levers — broke Japan out of the deflationary spiral that was threatening to spin out of control.
His support for corporate governance and stewardship reforms has permanently changed Japan’s boardrooms, and his support for women in the workplace, while it still has a long way to go, will have lasting changes, with more women now staying in the workplace and climbing the management ladder.
Not everything was a success. The third arrow of Abenomics — structural economic reform — never really flew, and he failed to overhaul the labor market as the country needed. He never saw his dream of reforming the constitution.
By the last year of his administration, he was running out of steam, dodging allegations of scandal. Much of his energy at the end was spent placating then-US president Donald Trump, who came into power full of 1980s ideas about Japan. Sadly there will be no last redeeming arc to Abe’s final years.
The COVID-19 pandemic forced the postponement of the Olympic Games that he was so instrumental in bringing to Tokyo. The stress of dealing with the pandemic appeared to revive his illness, forcing him to resign from the premiership in 2020. While the Olympics went ahead successfully last year, the spectator-free Games were not the celebration of Japan nor were they the triumph over COVID-19 that Abe had hoped for.
The question is where his absence will be most keenly felt. Right until his death, Abe was a political colossus. As leader of the largest faction in the LDP, he was a kingmaker, while as the party’s most prominent hawkish voice, he worked to cast off the postwar consensus that has held the country back. Most recently, he argued that Japan must double defense spending, and suggested that the country should host US nuclear weapons.
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has paid lip service to some of the ideas of Abenomics, but also rejected many of its “neoliberal” tenets in favor of policies of redistribution. With the policy of “new capitalism” — bolder perhaps than Abe’s ideas but also harder to grasp — Kishida has sought to chart a new course for the economy, one that many expected would become clearer after Sunday’s elections.
The tragedy might make it more difficult for Kishida to distance himself from Abe so explicitly. In the coming months, he will have to decide on a replacement for Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda, a decision that might define Kishida’s entire economic legacy. Abe’s death came as the yen fell to a historic low; and there is intense pressure on the bank to join other central banks in tightening, although Kishida has been broadly supportive of the Abe-Kuroda consensus so far.
Internationally, things are more secure. Thanks to Abe, the US relies upon Japan as its key ally in the region. Kishida is following the pattern. Some feared he might be too dovish on China, but his forceful rhetoric and action since the invasion of Ukraine appears to have put those concerns to rest.
The geopolitical consensus-building Abe spent so much time on is likely to grow stronger, at least until the next US presidential election.
However, Kishida might need special powers to equal Abe’s ability translate political and security wonkery into real-world action. What other Japanese leader could simultaneously embody Superman, a samurai and Super Mario fully 15 years ago, Abe pledged to make Japan “a new role model in the international community of the 21st century.” That sounds much less fanciful now than it did then. He undoubtedly leaves a more beautiful Japan behind, but its future feels less secure without him.
Gearoid Reidy is a Bloomberg News senior editor covering Japan. He previously led the breaking news team in North Asia and was the Tokyo deputy bureau chief. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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