3 days Ago
You may swoon or spit but there is no way that Japan can ignore former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Vocal critics called him a warmonger, while his fans saw him as the tough conservative leader who got Japan back on its feet again. Few though would deny that Abe remains a figure of major importance in postwar Japanese history.
How and why he mattered when holding office as Japan's longest serving premier is the subject of a new analysis of Abe's impact domestically and in foreign policy. It forms the latest in an ambitious series of handbooks put out by the Japan Documents publishing house in Tokyo. The approach by editor Tosh Minohara is to get his team of authors to provide detailed examination of Abe's dealings with regional nations, then wider organizations and finally issues on the home front.
Minohara scraps the conventional approach by relegating internal policies to the last section. Others might have started with his remarkable electoral victories and then shown how he used these to aid his foreign agenda but since the two were deployed in tandem his scheme works well. From December 2012 when he became prime minister for the second time until September 2020, Abe ran Japan his way.
He centralized power, saw off rivals and aimed to prove that his nation really was back after decades of sluggish growth and declining self-confidence. For years historians are going to be asking whether Abe had the right agenda and how successful he was in tackling a host of issues. With Japan now under its third prime minister since Abe's resignation on health grounds the public is unlikely to be in any generous mood for assessing the man.
The fact that he was granted a controversial state funeral following his assassination has also not been forgotten. The contrast between Abe's then victorious Liberal Democratic Party and the weak one under Shigeru Ishiba is striking. Yet the recent general election rebuffs to the LDP are linked to scandals going back to the Abe years and his once dominant faction with a dollop of "talent" figures selected by him is in tatters.
Where then did Abe make his mark? For editor Minohara and many Japan watchers overseas, the answer rests in one word: China. It was Abe who saw the need for his country to recognize the sheer scale of China's new power and to work relentlessly towards improving Japan - United States relations plus cultivating friends within South East Asia and beyond to counter Beijing. Much easier said than done.
Portions of the electorate had been brought up to believe in the seemingly attractive idea of Japanese pacifism and wanted nothing thank you very much to do with Abe's dream of Constitutional revision -- scrap Article 9 of the 1947 Constitution and all hell might break out warned his critics. In the end Abe's constitution dream faded but he did strengthen the Self Defense Forces, though the switching of U.S.
bases on Okinawa made little progress. The intense debate over Article 9 is covered calmly by Arbenita Sopaj is the final chapter of the book, doubtless leaving readers with the view that if Abe could not fix it then the issue is surely being kicked into the long grass for the next decade and more. The handbook gets to grips with Abe's personal diplomacy with U.
S. Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump, while also tackling areas that rarely make the news. It has sections on Japan's approaches to the European Union, one on Africa by former soccer ace Kweku Ampiah of Leeds University, a chapter on Brazil and another on Australia.
It is too early though for any definitive single-authored assessment of the Abe era. Yet for now readers have the opportunity to ask if Abe's record will really receive the high grade he was intent on gaining for himself, his family and the nation. Over the hyped plans to revive the economy under "Abenomics," it looks unlikely and whether his much quoted "Free and Open Indo-Pacific" had much flesh on its bones is also in doubt.
His dealings with Vladimir Putin’s Russia came to nought but Abe had more luck over ASEAN and he did his best in pushing for trade liberalization after the U.S. dropped out.
Opinions, of course, on Abe will differ but armed with the handbook's massive ammunition the armchair debate can at last get underway. "Handbook of Japan's Foreign and Domestic Policies During the Decade of Abe" (edited by Tosh Minohara) Japan Documents, Tokyo, 2024, 309 pages.
