Shinzo Abe pulled Japan out of the shadows

Former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, was shot dead by a 41-year-old who said nothing more than that he didn’t like Abe’s policies, on Friday morning, leaving Japan shell-shocked because the country had not witnessed a political assassination since 1960.

There were political assassinations in the troublesome 1930s when Japan was riding roughshod across eastern Asia but the country became politically quiescent in the post-War period.

Japan had been mostly ruled by leaders from the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which has been the ruling party ever since the traumatic end to Second World War after the first atomic bombs were dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9 of 1945.

Ever since, Japan had become an economic giant, and it celebrated its recovery by hosting the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.

Shinzo came to political power this century, serving as Tokyo governor before that. He tried to alter the post-World War status of Japan of a country whose constitution was written by the victors, and which had no standing army.

Abe wanted the Japanese army back in its rightful position as symbol of national unity. Japan became an economic superpower in the 1960s and 1970s before it went into irrecoverable slump in the 1990s.

Abe tried to do two things. He wanted to restore the military to its rightful place. He wanted the army to be used in other parts of the world as a key partner of Western alliance. He has set the ball rolling but it remains to be accomplished.

The second is that pulling Japan out of its economic slough. He kept the interest rates at zero- and even sub-zero levels, and he wanted to increase government spending. Japan is yet to recover from its two-decade old economic stagnation. But economic recovery remains to be accomplished as well.

But the more interesting aspect of Abe is his strong sense of nationalism at a time when successive prime ministers kept a low profile for Japan because of the bad flavour of Japanese militarism in the years that culminated in the Second World War.

Abe was not willing to tie himself down to the burdens of the past.

He felt the need to reassert a sense of Japanese nationalism shorn of its belligerence. And he had almost succeeded. He was keen that Japan should take its rightful place in global politics, and it is one of the reasons that he was wiling to make Japan a partner in the new strategic formation of Australia, Japan, India and the United States, which was also seen as a necessary check on China’s unchallenged hegemony in Asian and world politics.

Though he stepped down as prime minister due to health reasons, Abe with his record stint as prime minister from 2012 to 2020, had created a niche for himself in post-war Japanese history, as a man who wanted to shake off the shackles of the past.

This gave him the reputation of being a right-wing nationalist leader, but he was not afraid.

Abe belonged to one of the politically distinguished families in Japan. His father served as foreign minister and his grandfather was prime minister.

Abe tried to make Japan count in the world in a positive sense at a time when China had emerged as a de facto super power in economic and strategic terms.

Japan had lost its economic edge of the 1960s and 1970s with China and South Korea emerging as key players in the global economy.

Abe provided direction to a listless Japan. Many were wary of Japan’s re-emergence as a strong power, but Abe showed Japan was a power for the good.