Shinzo Abe

• 1. Introduction

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  Shinzo Abe was shot while delivering a campaign speech in the city of Nara on the 8th of July 2022. He died that day, becoming the first assassinated former Japanese prime minister since 1936. His killer, Tetsuya Yamagami, later confessed that his motive traced not to Abe's politics but to Abe's ties with the Unification Church. It was a startling end for a man who had spent nearly two decades reshaping Japanese conservatism from the inside. Who was this politician, and how did a boy who once wanted to be a filmmaker wind up as the longest-serving prime minister in Japanese history? The answers run through a dynasty, a pair of illnesses, a three-arrow economic gambit, and a set of historical controversies that put him at odds with his own constitution.

• 2. The Family Behind the Politician

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  Abe was born on the 21st of September 1954 in Shinjuku, Tokyo, into what can only be described as a ruling-class political lineage. His father Shintaro Abe served in the House of Representatives from 1958 to 1991, holding the posts of Chief Cabinet Secretary, Minister for International Trade and Industry, and Minister for Foreign Affairs, and was widely regarded as a credible candidate for prime minister before his death. His mother Yoko was a noted calligrapher. Yet it was his maternal grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, who shaped Abe most profoundly. Kishi had served as a minister in the wartime cabinet of Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, was imprisoned as a suspected Class-A war criminal by the American occupation, then was released as part of the Cold War's "reverse course" and went on to help found the Liberal Democratic Party in 1955. Kishi served as Prime Minister of Japan from 1957 until his resignation following the Anpo protests in 1960. Abe called Kishi his "No 1 role model", and later wrote that feeling "strong repulsion" at having a grandfather labeled a war criminal suspect had, paradoxically, made him more emotionally attached to conservatism. His paternal grandfather Kan Abe, a landowner from Yamaguchi, sat in the House of Representatives during World War II and was himself a pacifist who opposed the Tojo government. The two grandfathers pointed in opposite directions, and that tension never fully left Abe's public life.

• 3. Ulcerative Colitis and the Long Road to Power

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  At the age of 17, Abe was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, a condition that would interrupt his career twice and ultimately force him from office. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in political science from Seikei University in 1977, then spent two semesters studying English at the University of Southern California, leaving before completing the program. After working briefly at Kobe Steel starting in April 1979, he left in 1982 to serve as secretary to his father, who had just been appointed foreign minister in the Nakasone cabinet. Shintaro Abe visited 81 countries in the 1980s, and those travels gave his son an early education in international relationship-building. When his father died in 1991, Abe ran for his House of Representatives seat in 1993 and won the most votes among the four representatives elected in his district. He joined the Seiwa Seisaku Kenkyukai, a conservative LDP faction that his father had headed from 1986 until his death, and whose senior members included Yoshiro Mori and Junichiro Koizumi. During the 1990s Abe threw himself into right-wing parliamentary groups and focused heavily on the issue of Japanese citizens abducted by North Korea. In 1997, he criticized the government's response to the abductions on the floor of the Diet as "equivalent to abdicating the duties of the state". A severe colitis attack struck in 1998, but he found a treatment that allowed remission. His office and a supporters' office in Shimonoseki were attacked with Molotov cocktails on multiple occasions in 2000 by members of the Kudo-kai, a Kitakyushu-based yakuza syndicate, in a dispute tracing back to a local mayoral election. By 2005, Koizumi had appointed him Chief Cabinet Secretary, giving Abe the national visibility that launched his prime ministerial candidacy.

• 4. First Premiership and Quick Fall

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  On the 26th of September 2006, Abe was inaugurated as Prime Minister at age 52, making him Japan's youngest post-war premier and the first born after World War II. He was also the first prime minister to hold the office since Fumimaro Konoe in 1941 at so young an age. Almost immediately, the contradictions of his position surfaced. In March 2007, he publicly stated there was no evidence that the Japanese military had coerced women into sexual slavery during the war, a direct contradiction of the Japanese government's own 1992 Kono Statement. His Agriculture Minister Toshikatsu Matsuoka committed suicide amid political funding scandals, the first cabinet member to die that way since World War II, and the LDP suffered a major defeat in the upper house election, losing control of that chamber for the first time in 52 years. A reshuffled cabinet brought a 10-percent rise in support, only for the new agriculture minister Takehiko Endo to resign just seven days after appointment over a finance scandal. On the 12th of September 2007, only three days after a new parliamentary session had begun, Abe announced his resignation at an unscheduled press conference, minutes before opposition leaders were set to question him. He had previously pledged never to resign. His stated reason was that his unpopularity was blocking an anti-terrorism law related to Japan's presence in Afghanistan, and party officials cited poor health. He later revealed the illness was ulcerative colitis, brought under control only after he gained access to a drug called Asacol that had not previously been available in Japan.

• 5. Abenomics and the Record Second Term

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  Abe returned to the LDP presidency on the 26th of September 2012, winning a runoff against former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba by 108 votes to 89. He campaigned under the slogan "Nippon o Torimodosu" ("Take back Japan"), promising monetary easing, higher public spending, continued nuclear energy use, and a tough line on territorial disputes. The LDP won 294 seats in the 480-seat House of Representatives on the 16th of December 2012, and with the New Komeito coalition partner, Abe controlled a two-thirds majority. On the 26th of December he was formally elected prime minister with 328 out of 480 votes, becoming the first former prime minister to return to office since Shigeru Yoshida in 1948. His economic strategy, Abenomics, was built on three arrows: monetary expansion aimed at 2 percent inflation, a flexible fiscal policy for short-term stimulus followed by budget balance, and structural reform to drive long-term growth. The first arrow moved fast. By mid-2013, the yen had fallen from roughly 77 to the dollar to 101.8, and the Nikkei 225 had risen 70 percent. The government's first budget contained a 10.3-trillion-yen stimulus package. He pressed Bank of Japan governor Masaaki Shirakawa so hard toward an easing commitment that Shirakawa announced early departure before his term expired; Abe replaced him with Haruhiko Kuroda, who had previously advocated inflation targets. A consumption tax rise from 5 to 8 percent in April 2014 tipped Japan into recession for two consecutive quarters, forcing Abe to delay a planned second rise and call a snap election. He ran the election explicitly as an "Abenomics Dissolution" referendum on his economic program and won. The cabinet inaugurated in December 2012 lasted 617 days without a single personnel change, described as the most stable cabinet in post-war Japanese history. On the 19th of November 2019, Abe surpassed the 2,883-day record of Katsura Taro to become Japan's longest-serving prime minister. On the 24th of August 2020 he broke Eisaku Sato's 2,798-day consecutive record as well.

• 6. Security Ambitions and Regional Tensions

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  In 2007, Abe launched the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue bringing together Japan, the United States, Australia, and India as a counterweight to China's growing power. Back in office from 2012, he moved aggressively to rebuild Japan's security apparatus. In November 2013, the Diet passed his State Secrecy Law, which expanded the government's power to classify information and raised penalties for leaks to up to 10 years in prison and a 10-million-yen fine. Thousands protested in Tokyo and his cabinet's approval rating fell below 50 percent in some polls for the first time. In July 2014, the cabinet reinterpreted the constitution to allow "Collective Self-Defense", meaning the Self-Defense Forces could aid an ally under attack even if Japan itself was not threatened, a major shift from the strictly pacifist prior interpretation. Eleven bills making up the Legislation for Peace and Security passed the House of Councillors 148 votes to 90 on the 19th of September 2015, becoming law after the longest Diet session in the post-war era. Relations with China deteriorated sharply. Abe's December 2013 visit to the Yasukuni Shrine drew a warning from the Chinese Foreign Minister that Japan was moving in an "extremely dangerous" direction. No bilateral meetings between Abe and Chinese leadership took place for the first 23 months of his second term. He met President Xi Jinping for the first time only at the APEC meeting in Beijing in November 2014, a session described by the press as "awkward". Relations with South Korea were similarly strained, particularly after the Supreme Court of Korea in 2018 ordered Japanese companies to compensate families of Koreans forced into wartime labor, a ruling Abe rejected on the grounds that all such matters had been settled by the Treaty on Basic Relations. Japan's December 2015 defense budget, its largest ever at 5.1 trillion yen (equivalent to roughly 45 billion US dollars), approved funding for Global Hawk drones, F-35 fighter jets, and a Boeing KC-46A midair refueling aircraft.

• 7. Scandals, Resignation, and Assassination

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  In March 2018, it was revealed that the finance ministry had falsified documents presented to parliament to remove 14 passages implicating Abe in the Moritomo Gakuen scandal. A separate allegation, referred to by some as "Abegate", held that Abe had given preferential treatment to his friend Kotaro Kake to open a veterinary department at his school, Kake Gakuen. Support fell below 30 percent in polls, the lowest since his return to power in 2012. In July 2018, he held a drinking party with LDP lawmakers during the peak of severe flooding in western Japan, further damaging his public standing. In 2020, extending the term of top Tokyo prosecutor Hiromu Kurokawa, who later resigned amid a gambling scandal, drove his approval rating from 40 percent to 27 percent in a single month. Abe's colitis relapsed in June 2020, and by the 28th of August he announced his resignation, citing his inability to perform the duties of the office while seeking treatment. He was succeeded by Yoshihide Suga. On the 8th of July 2022, Abe was delivering a campaign speech for upper house elections in Nara when he was shot and killed. The assassin, Tetsuya Yamagami, stated that his motive was Abe's ties to the Unification Church, an organization Yamagami held responsible for his family's financial ruin. It was the first assassination of a former Japanese prime minister since 1936. Abe left behind a country sharply divided on his legacy: supporters credited him with strengthening Japan's security posture and its international standing; critics pointed to his historical negationism, his membership in the ultranationalist organization Nippon Kaigi, and the persistent threat his policies posed to Japan's pacifist framework and to relations with China and South Korea.