Abe Shinzo: A retrospective

All the ways he defied my expectations.

 
As everyone by now knows, former Japanese prime minister Abe Shinzo was assassinated yesterday while giving a campaign speech in the city of Nara. The assassin, Yamagami Tetsuya, said that he killed Abe because of his supposed ties to an as-yet-unnamed religious group, whose leader Yamagami also reportedly wanted to kill.

Assassination is not unheard-of in Japan — the mayor of Nagasaki was assassinated in 2007, and a Diet member was slain in 2002, both probably by members of the mafia. But ideologically motivated assassinations, which were common in the turbulent prewar age, are now rare — the last major one was in 1960. This one has deeply shocked the country, and may change Japan’s easygoing culture of public political speechmaking, where major politicians stop off by train stations to talk to small crowds.

Abe was the most important Japanese politician of his time — certainly since his grandfather Kishi Nobusuke in the late 1950s. He came into office at a very difficult time, when Japan was recovering from a huge earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster. Most Japanese prime ministers are weak figures who govern by consensus and let the bureaucracy or party factions handle most things; Abe used the mandate created by the post-earthquake crisis to centralize policymaking power in the hands of his cabinet. Over his eight years in office — very long by Japanese standards — he made a number of important policy changes that reshaped the entire country of Japan.

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Πηγή: noahpinion.substack.com