Slain nationalist led Japan from 2012 to 2020
Shinzo Abe, the longestserving prime minister of Japan, who sought to revive the country as an economic and military power to confront China’s rising influence, died Friday after being shot by a gunman. He was
67.
The assassination, during a campaign event for party allies in Nara, near Osaka, left Japan stunned. The killing brought an outpouring of tributes around the world for Abe, the scion of a prominent political family whose stamp on Japan’s politics and international affairs spanned nearly a generation. Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party has led Japan for all but four years since the mid-1950s. In Japan, the LDP is regarded as center-right.
Abe brought a measure of stability as prime minister from 2012 to 2020 after years of revolving-door leadership that complicated Japan’s critical alliances, including its trade and defense ties with Washington. Yet challenges – some self-imposed – gave the eight-year Abe era a sense of rough edges and unfulfilled aspirations.
Abe (pronounced AH-bay) took power as the country was still reeling from the
2011 earthquake and tsunami that destroyed the Fukushima nuclear facility and left a radioactive no-go zone in parts of the country. One of his first official visits outside Tokyo was a tour of the Fukushima site, wearing a mask and blue coveralls.
He stepped down in September 2020 because of medical issues – chronic ulcerative colitis – amid the pandemic that upended his economic visions and delayed until 2021 one of his crown jewels, bringing the
Olympics back to Tokyo.
At the Closing Ceremonies of the Rio de Janeiro Olympics in 2016, Abe dressed as Super Mario of Nintendo fame to celebrate the preparations for the Tokyo Games. Abe did not attend the lockdown-style opening of those Summer Olympics, allowing his successor, Yoshihide Suga, to have center stage.
Abe also struggled with many of his signature initiatives.
At the top were efforts to bring some of the Silicon Valley ethos of innovation and risk-taking into Japan’s tradition-laden economy, still one of the world’s largest but stuck in a slow-growth slumber for decades. At the same time, he pushed hard to expand Japan’s military capabilities in the face of a rising China and a nuclear-armed North Korea, planning for new bases on islands and boosting defense spending.
But he could not find the political or public backing to revise Japan’s pacifist constitution written during the U.S. occupation after World War II.
Shinzo Abe took special interest in building rapport with the Oval Office, often using his love of golf as a calling card.
He was the first foreign leader to visit President Donald Trump after his election victory in 2016 – even as many other U.S. allies were keeping a distance. In 2013, Abe presented President Barack Obama with a Japanese-made putter and recounted how his grandfather as prime minister played golf with President Dwight D. Eisenhower after their first meeting in Washington in 1957.
Joe Biden, then the vice president, asked Abe whether Eisenhower or his grandfather had the better score.
“It’s a state secret,” Abe replied.
Abe asked for “forgiveness” that he was leaving office without managing to make the constitutional changes or reaching other goals, including bringing back the remaining Japanese citizens abducted by North Korea and settling territorial disputes with Russia over an island chain, known in Russia as the Kurils and in Japan as the Northern Territories.
“It is really with a very heavy heart that I am resigning without being able to attain those things,” said Abe, who also was prime minister for a year in 2006-2007. He left then, too, citing medical troubles.
Shinzo Abe was born in Tokyo on Sept. 21, 1954, to a family deeply involved in Japan’s postwar politics and carrying the burden of connections to the former imperial rule and its militaristic expansionism.
In 1982, Abe served as executive assistant to his father, who was then foreign minister. He was first elected as a member of the Diet, Japan’s parliament, in 1993 for the southwestern prefecture of Yamaguchi. He smashed open a barrel of sake to celebrate.
He steadily rose through the LDP ranks to become its leader in 2005, putting him in line as a potential prime minister. That came in September 2006. It gave Abe a first chance to test his economic agenda, which became known as the “three arrows”: easier borrowing, increased government spending, and other economic changes aimed at revamping the economy to deal with issues such as an aging population and an ossified bureaucracy.
Abe appeared to be at the apex of his political rise, but upheavals in his government – including allegations of doling out illegal farm subsidies – soon stole the limelight. The subsidies probe apparently led to the suicide of Abe’s agriculture minister, Toshikatsu Matsuoka. Abe stepped down after just one year, citing medical issues and sending his party into disarray. It took five years for him to get back to the prime minister’s office.
Abe’s style was workmanlike – with occasional flashes of wry humor – and his inner circle was built mostly around technocrats and loyalists. In a relative sense, Abe’s leadership was designed for low drama to avoid the missteps of his first time as leader.
In a speech on the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, he appeared to suggest that Japan needed to move on from the shadows of the war. “We must not let our children, grandchildren and even further generations to come, who have nothing to do with that war, be predestined to apologize,” he said in August 2015.