The post-war Japan that Shinzo Abe built
In January 2007, only a few months after he was elected, at 52, as Japan’s youngest prime minister of the postwar era, Shinzo Abe delivered a speech outlining his policy priorities after the opening ceremony of the 166th session of Japan’s Diet, the country’s parliamentary body.
Most of the speech was a mundane laundry list of proposals, but one line proved especially revealing about the character of the man. “My mission is none other than to draw a new vision of a nation that can withstand the raging waves for the next 50 to 100 years,” Mr. Abe said.
I have regularly returned to this line – over the course of my writing about the former prime minister and as I reflected on his assassination on Friday – because it provided insight into what animated Mr. Abe as a politician. He was not a politician who was content to think small. His family hailed from Yamaguchi Prefecture in western Japan. The area was home to some of the principal architects of the Meiji Restoration – the return of the emperor as a figurehead in 1867 and subsequent construction of a modern Japanese state by reformist elements. Mr. Abe admired those leaders.The leaders of Meiji Japan were not just building a modern state for its own sake. They were building a state that would be able to fend off and eventually compete with the European and American empires that were busy carving up Asia. As Mr. Abe’s talk of building a nation to “withstand the raging waves” suggests, he shared this fundamental sensibility. He was a nationalist; he saw his country as engaged in a fierce competition among nations and believed that a politician’s duty, first and foremost, was to ensure the security and prosperity of his people. But he was also a statist, in that he believed that it was ultimately the responsibility of the state and its leaders to perform this duty. This is why debates about whether Mr. Abe was an ideologue or a realist miss the point. Over the course of his career, he repeatedly acted in ways that he thought would strengthen the Japanese state in its efforts to protect the Japanese people in a dangerous world.
Decisions that may have looked ideological – for example, efforts by Mr. Abe and other conservative politicians to introduce Japan’s version of patriotic education to schools and replace textbooks that taught what he considered “masochistic” history that discussed wartime atrocities – were fundamentally about strengthening the state (whether or not replacing textbooks would achieve this goal). His critics worried that the changes would undercut a core tenet of the textbooks that they believed help retain Japan’s peaceful existence. But he believed that a strong state needed to raise citizens who felt proud of their country and were willing to sacrifice on its behalf, even by taking up arms if necessary.
His statism was easier to see in other areas. He used the slogan “Escaping the postwar regime” during his first premiership, and it continued to characterize his vision in his second premiership – a self-conscious effort to uproot institutions introduced during and immediately after the US occupation of Japan. He believed they constrained the country’s ability to defend itself, most notably the postwar Constitution and Article 9, its war-renouncing peace clause.
During his second term, he ordered his government to reinterpret Article 9 to permit Japan’s exercise of its right to collective self-defense, which would enable its armed forces to come to the aid of an ally in certain circumstances. Later he proposed amendments to the Constitution, including to Article 9, and pledged that he would ratify them by 2020; this effort, however, failed.
(To be continued)