Shinzo Abe

• 1. Family Legacy And Early Life

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  Shinzo Abe was born on the 21st of September 1954 in Shinjuku, Tokyo. His father Shintaro Abe served in the House of Representatives from 1958 to 1991. During World War II, Shintaro volunteered to be a kamikaze pilot but the war ended before he completed training. Abe's maternal grandfather Nobusuke Kishi was the de facto economic king of occupied China and Manchukuo. Kishi served as Vice Minister of Munitions in the cabinet of Prime Minister Hideki Tojo during the war. At the end of the war, Kishi was imprisoned as a suspected Class-A war criminal by the US military occupation of Japan. He was later released and de-purged as part of the Occupation's reverse course due to the Cold War. Kishi helped found the Liberal Democratic Party in 1955 and served as Prime Minister of Japan from 1957 until his 1960 resignation following the Anpo protests. The BBC speculated that Abe's aversion to protests may have originated as a result. Abe viewed Kishi as his No 1 role model and was influenced by many of his beliefs like Kishi's hawkish stance on China. Regarding Kishi, Abe later wrote: Some people used to point to my grandfather as a Class-A war criminal suspect, and I felt strong repulsion. Because of that experience, I may have become emotionally attached to conservatism, on the contrary. His mother Yoko was a noted calligrapher. Abe's paternal grandfather Kan Abe was a Yamaguchi landowner who served in the House of Representatives during World War II. In contrast to Kishi, Kan Abe was a stalwart pacifist who opposed the Tojo government and war in East Asia.

• 2. First Premiership And Resignation

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  On the 26th of September 2006, Abe was inaugurated as Japanese prime minister. Elected at age 52, he was the youngest prime minister since Fumimaro Konoe in 1941. He was also the first prime minister born after World War II. Abe's first cabinet was announced on the 26th of September 2006. The only minister retained in his position from the previous Koizumi cabinet was Foreign Minister Taro Aso. In addition to the cabinet positions existing under Koizumi, Abe created five new advisor positions. He reshuffled his cabinet on the 27th of August 2007. Commentators noted that these changes seemed to be an effort by Abe to organize the Prime Minister's office into something more akin to the White House. The New York Times observed that his cabinet appeared to place a larger emphasis on foreign policy and national security instead of domestic concerns like economic policy. It also speculated that Abe's primary goal may have been to revise the pacifist constitution. Domestic policy expressed a general commitment to the reforms instituted by his predecessor Junichiro Koizumi. He took some steps toward balancing the Japanese budget such as appointing a tax policy expert Koji Omi as minister of finance. Since 1997, as the bureau chief of the Institute of Junior Assembly Members Who Think About the Outlook of Japan and History Education, Abe supported the controversial Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform and the New History Textbook. In March 2007, Abe along with right-wing politicians proposed a bill to encourage nationalism and a love for one's country and hometown among the Japanese youth. In March 2007, Abe stated that there was no evidence that the Japanese military had forced women into sexual slavery during World War II which the Japanese government had admitted and apologized for in the 1992 Kono Statement. Responding to a potential motion by the US Congress encouraging Japan to acknowledge the atrocity, Abe stated that the Japanese government would not apologize again. On the 12th of September 2007, only three days after a new parliamentary session had begun, Abe announced his intention to resign his position as prime minister at an unscheduled press conference. The announcement came just minutes before opposition leaders were scheduled to question him in Parliament and shocked many. Party officials also said the embattled prime minister was suffering from poor health.

• 3. Abenomics Economic Strategy

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  In February 2013, Abe gave an address at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC where he explained his economic and diplomatic objectives. His economic strategy referred to as Abenomics consisted of the so-called three arrows policy. The first arrow was monetary expansion aimed at achieving a 2 percent inflation target. The second was a flexible fiscal policy to act as an economic stimulus in the short term then achieve a budget surplus. The third was a growth strategy focusing on structural reform and private sector investment to achieve long-term growth. In 2019 it was reported that 40 percent of key economic statistics collected from 2005 to 2017 contained errors casting doubt on the effectiveness of Abe's economic program. It was discovered that the labor ministry did not follow protocol by only surveying about one-third of all the large Japanese businesses it was supposed to survey. The data was eventually corrected and it was discovered that the faulty data presented Japanese economic statistics more favorably than the corrected data. The faulty data cost 19.7 million people about 53.7 billion yen in unpaid benefits and cost the Japanese government 650 million yen to correct the error. Opposition politicians criticized the governments response; one lawmaker called Abe's economic program a fraud with many journalists labeling the event as a data scandal. At the first CEFP meeting in January 2013, Abe declared that the Bank of Japan should follow a policy of monetary easing to achieve a target of 2 percent inflation. Abe maintained pressure on the Bank's governor Masaaki Shirakawa who was reluctant to set specific targets into agreeing to the policy. In February after Abe publicly speculated that the government could legislate to strip the bank of independence Shirakawa announced he was leaving office prematurely before his term expired. Abe then appointed Haruhiko Kuroda as governor who had previously advocated inflation targets and who has pursued the government's policies of monetary easing.

• 4. Security Reinterpretations And Legislation

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  In July 2014, the Abe cabinet decided to reinterpret Japan's constitution to allow for the right of Collective Self-Defense. This would allow the Self Defense Forces to come to the aid of and defend an ally under attack whereas the previous interpretation of the constitution was strictly pacifist and allowed for the force to be used only in absolute self-defence. The decision was supported by the United States which has argued for greater scope for action by Japan as a regional ally and led to a revision of the US-Japan defense cooperation guidelines in 2015. In response the Chinese Foreign Ministry said the decision raised doubts about Japan's commitment to peace and argued that the Japanese public is opposed to the concept of collective self-defense. This led to the introduction of the 2015 security legislation to give legal effect to the cabinet's decision. The Abe cabinet then introduced 11 bills making up the Legislation for Peace and Security into the Diet in May 2015 which pushed for a limited expansion of military powers to fight in a foreign conflict. The principal aims of the bills were to allow Japan's Self-Defense Forces to come to the aid of allied nations under attack even if Japan itself was not in an existential crisis situation. To allow for enough time to pass the bills in the face of lengthy opposition scrutiny, the Abe cabinet extended the Diet session by 95 days from June into September making it the longest in the post-war era. The bills passed the House of Representatives on the 16th of July with the support of the majority LDP-Komeito coalition. Diet members from the opposition Democratic Innovation Communist and Social Democratic parties walked out of the vote in protest at what they said was the government's move to force the bills through without sufficient debate and ignore responsible opposition parties. Many protested outside the Diet buildings denouncing what was referred to as war bills by opponents. Organizers of the protests estimated that up to 100,000 protesters marched against the bills' passage of the lower house in July.

• 5. Foreign Policy And Alliances

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  In 2007, Abe initiated the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue between Japan the United States Australia and India aimed at resisting China's rise as a superpower. His three-day visit to India in August 2007 inaugurated a new bilateral Asian alliance building on the long history of friendly bilateral relations between India and Japan. In January 2014, Abe became the first Japanese leader to attend India's Republic Day Parade in Delhi as chief guest during a three-day visit where he and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh agreed to increase cooperation over economic defense and security issues and signed trade agreements related to energy tourism and telecoms. A close relationship was anticipated between Abe and Narendra Modi after the latter's election as Prime Minister of India in May 2014 when it was noted that they had established ties from at least seven years previously when Modi was still Chief Minister of Gujarat and that Modi was one of three people Abe followed on Twitter. The two men exchanged congratulatory messages after the election. Modi made his first major foreign visit to Japan in autumn of 2014 where during the visit Abe invited Modi to become the first Indian leader to stay at the Imperial State Guest House in Kyoto. On the 30th of May 2014, Abe told officials from the ASEAN countries the United States and Australia that Japan wanted to play a major role in maintaining regional security a departure from the passiveness it has displayed since World War II. He offered Japan's support to other countries in resolving territorial disputes. Relations between Japan and its immediate neighbors China and South Korea remained poor after Abe's return to office. While he declared that the doors are always open on my side no bilateral meetings between Abe and Chinese leadership took place for the first 23 months of his second term. Neither did Abe hold any meetings with President Park Geun-hye of South Korea during his 2012 to 2014 term of office. Both countries criticized Abe's visit to the Yasukuni Shrine in December 2013 with the Chinese Foreign Minister describing the action as moving Japan in an extremely dangerous direction.

• 6. Assassination And Aftermath

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  In 2022, Abe was assassinated in Nara while delivering a campaign speech for the upper house elections. The killer Tetsuya Yamagami confessed he was motivated by Abe's ties with the Unification Church. This was the first assassination of a former Japanese prime minister since 1936. A polarizing figure in Japan, Abe was praised by his supporters for strengthening Japan's security and international stature while opponents criticized him for nationalistic policies and historical negationism which they view as threatening Japanese pacifism and damaging relations with China and South Korea. Early life Family Shinzo Abe was born on the 21st of September 1954 to a prominent political family in Shinjuku Tokyo. Although as a boy he aspired to become a filmmaker, Abe's family history led him upon a political path. His father Shintaro Abe served in the House of Representatives from 1958 to 1991 with stints as Chief Cabinet Secretary Minister for International Trade and Industry and Minister for Foreign Affairs. During World War II, Shintaro volunteered to be a kamikaze pilot but the war ended before he completed training. Abe's maternal grandfather Nobusuke Kishi was the de facto economic king of occupied China and Manchukuo a Japanese puppet state in Northern China established after the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in the lead-up to the Second Sino-Japanese War and World War II. During the war, Kishi served as Vice Minister of Munitions in the cabinet of Prime Minister Hideki Tojo. At the end of the war, Kishi was imprisoned as a suspected Class-A war criminal by the US military occupation of Japan but was released and later de-purged as part of the Occupation's reverse course due to the Cold War.