Shinzo Abe's assasination

Looking back on Abe's long reign

Hola Global Jigsaw friends,

The assassination of Shinzo Abe has left me bewildered and disoriented. Japan is among the world’s safest countries, with very low levels of gun violence and some of the world’s most stringent firearm laws. In 2021, there were only10 shootings (leading to a single death) across this country of 125-odd million people.

And Japanese politics, at least in their contemporary avatar, are a sedate affair. The last killing of a national-level political figure was in 1960, when a 17-year-old extreme nationalist stabbed and killed Inejiro Asanuma, of Japan’s Socialist Party.

I bring you an excerpt from my book, Orienting: An Indian in Japan, in which I assess the legacy of Abe’s long political career, its highlights and failures.

Shinzo Abe (21 September 1954 – 8 July 2022)

It’s a sad day today. One I had never imagined was only round the corner when I wrote this:

*****

Mr. Abe bestrode the Japanese political landscape like a colossus in salaryman clothing for the best part of a decade. On November 2019, he became the longest serving Prime Minister of the country, overtaking Mr. Taro Katsura's (a three term Prime Minister between 1901 and 1913) all-time record of 2,886 days in office.

Mr. Abe’s lineage was so robust as to endow his rise to the political summit almost with a sense of inevitability. His maternal grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, was prime minister from 1957 to 1960, while his paternal grandfather, Kan Abe, was a member of the House of Representatives. His father, Shintaro Abe, had served as foreign minister. Another former prime minister, Sato Eisaku  (1964-72) was his great uncle.

Mr. Abe served at the head of government in two different spells: a sprint between July 2006 and September 2007, and a marathon between 2012 and August 2020. During his second act he brought stability to what had been a fractured polity, honing the image of a strong leader readying Japan for a newly muscular role on the world stage. He had steered the economy out of deflation and decline, if not into growth, then at least a less turbulent holding pattern. He had presided over an increase in the country’s military capabilities and attempted to expand Japan’s strategic options beyond its traditional reliance on the United States.

 And yet his legacy was unlikely be as long lasting as his time in office. It was difficult to live in Japan and avoid the feeling that the only reason Mr. Abe remained in power was because of a weak and uninspiring opposition. In other words, the TINA (there is no alternative) factor that voters around the world were all too familiar with.

Just over a year after I moved to Tokyo, in September 2017, Shinzo Abe declared snap elections to be held a month later, on October 22. The polls would be more than a year ahead of schedule. Coming from a country where anyone in power clung to it till the bitter end, the idea of precipitating a vote when there was no crisis was bizarre enough, but the really disconcerting phenomenon was what followed, ie: not much.

Having just spent four years in Indonesia with its India-style election jamborees featuring noisy political rallies, outspoken trade unionists, and a free and assertive press, Japan’s electioneering was so bland, it cried out for some masala.  With one week to go for the elections lead stories in the newspaper were as follows: G20 finance chiefs upbeat on world economy; Shift towards renewable energy picking up steam; Japan’s ‘Way of the sword” baffling to foreigners; and Japan zoo mourns death of anime-loving celebrity penguin.

Whenever I asked my Japanese friends whom they planned to vote for their embarrassed silences would eventually dissolve into a cough from which it was just possible to discern ‘The LDP,’ Mr. Abe’s, Liberal Democratic Party. Not that any of them actually liked the man, but there was no viable opposition and ultimately few felt that the choice of Prime Minister made a significant difference to their lives.

There was a baffling chasm between what the electorate seemed to want and what their would-be elected representatives seemed interested in representing. This was illustrated most clearly by Mr. Abe’s most cherished political goal: the amendment of Article 9 of the constitution, the clause that restricted Japan’s ability to maintain a military deterrent.  The article in question explicitly stated the decision to “forever renounce war as a sovereign right” and to eschew the maintenance of military forces. It essentially enshrined a pacifist stance into the codes governing Japan, facilitated by a security alliance with the U.S. that committed the latter to defending the archipelago in the event of an attack.

But for nationalists like Mr. Abe, Article 9 was a humiliating reminder of Japan’s World War II defeat and the subsequent imposition of a U.S.-drafted constitution. Moreover, in a regional security environment shaped by North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs and an assertive, arguably aggressive, China on the prowl, Article 9 was seen by them as an unreasonable limitation of Japan’s ability to project power and defend itself.

Article 9 had in fact been reinterpreted (without formal amendment) several times over the decades. Since 1954, Japan had maintained a self-defence force (SDF), which had long morphed into an impressive military in much but name. It was about 250,000-strong and trained to use some of the most cutting-edge defence equipment in all of Asia.

In 2015, Mr. Abe revised the SDF law to permit “collective self-defence”, giving the green light for Japan to come to the military aid of allies under attack. He also boosted defence budgets. A five-year defence programme announced in 2018 allocated 25.5 trillion yen ($233.7 billion) in spending, a 6.4 percent rise over the previous five years.

Oddly, given Mr. Abe’s electoral popularity, none of these changes was popular. The 2015 law revision had led to a huge public outcry. And opinion polls regularly demonstrated that the majority of Japanese remained opposed to tinkering with Article 9.

Technically all Mr. Abe wanted was a formal recognition of the de facto reality of the SDF by inscribing it in the constitution. But the symbolism of it was suspect, particularly given the Prime Minister and the LDP’s history of downplaying Japanese war crimes. A few examples: In a 1995 resolution in the House of Representatives, 221 members of the LDP had emphasized that the Pacific War had been a war to ‘liberate’ Asia from colonialism.

In 1997 a group of young LDP politicians promoting revisionist history, Nihon no Zento to Rekishi Kyōiku wo Kangaeru Wakate Giin no Kai (Group of Young Diet Members for Consideration of Japan’s Future and History Education), was established. Mr Abe was a founding member and executive secretary of the group. Later, during his first tenure as Prime Minister he publicly shared his belief that “comfort women,” as the, largely Chinese and Korean, sex slaves of the Imperial Japanese Army during the war were referred to, had not in fact been coerced into sex work.[1]

The point here is not to debate the merits of Mr. Abe’s proposed constitutional revision. It is to highlight the deeper flaws in Japan’s democracy, which tended to being formal rather than substantial. People voted in regular elections between an array of political parties, yet the LDP had almost never been out power since it was established in 1955. The only exceptions were brief periods between 1993 and 1994, and again from 2009 to 2012.

But I remained unable to locate the wellsprings of love for the LDP that such figures seemed to indicate. Instead, a substantial share of the votes that the party garnered were simply votes by default, cast by citizens on auto-mode, because that’s what they’d always done. The sense of disconnect between politicians and the electorate generated a kind of unreality where the general public seemed more exercised about the death of a penguin at the zoo than in determining the leadership of their country.

***********

Notwithstanding the lackluster opposition, it wasn’t all smooth sailing for the Japanese Prime Minister. Through his tenure Mr. Abe was embroiled in a series of corruption charges that came to light with the regularity of the change of seasons. For an Indian like me, used to truly operatic governmental scandals, Japanese-style corruption could come across as a tad feeble. The charges facing the PM and his government included the sanctioning of a veterinary school license, the alleged bribing of constituents with crabs and melons and the guest list for a cherry blossom viewing party. But these were not as inconsequential as they might seem. The evidence pointed to cronyisim and dishonesty being deep-seated in Japanese institutions.

In 2018, Mr. Abe was in the hotseat over two charges. One had to do with facilitating a veterinary school license for a friend of his, the first such school to get a new license in more than 50 years. The second was related to the Prime Minister’s possible involvement in a heavily discounted sale of state-owned land to a kindergarten operator, Moritomo Gakuen. The operator who had established ties to Mr. Abe’s wife made an alleged profit of $7.5 million over the land deal. The Moritomo incident had first emerged in early 2017 but resurfaced after a revelation that official documents related to the sale had been doctored, with references to Mr. Abe and his wife, Akie Abe, scrubbed. Ms. Abe was originally listed as the honorary principal for the school planned on the land in question, although she stood down after the controversy broke. In the veterinary school matter, although Mr. Abe repeatedly denied using any influence to help his friend, an official document emerged that suggested otherwise.

But the Prime Minister denied all charges. In the Moritomo case he parried matters by claiming that the unaltered documents may have mentioned his name but did not constitute evidence of either his or his wife’s involvement with the land sale.

A year on, in late 2019 the Abe government faced more accusations. It began in October with the resignation of two newly appointed cabinet ministers in quick succession. The first to go was Trade Minister Isshu Sugawara, who stepped down just a month after taking over the key post, following a report by the Shukan Bunshun magazine that claimed he had gifted expensive melons, oranges and crabs to voters. He was also accused of offering 20,000 yen ($185) as condolence money to defray the costs of a funeral by the family of a supporter.

Less than a week later, it was Justice Minister Katsuyuki Kawai’s turn after another report in the same magazine alleged that his campaign staff had sent potatoes, corn, mangoes and other presents to constituents. The Prime Minister accepted the resignations and apologised to “the people” for the errors in his judgment in appointing the alleged offenders. “As the person who appointed him, I bear responsibility for this, for which I apologise to the nation,” Mr. Abe told reporters shortly after accepting Mr. Kawai’s resignation.

But he bore no such responsibility for the allegations against him that emerged a few weeks later about whether he rewarded his own supporters with invitations to a cherry blossom-viewing party that cost the public exchequer 55 million. The matter got murkier as it appeared that organised crime figures had been among the attendees and that crucial documents, including the guest list for the party, had been suspiciously shredded on the very day the opposition asked to see the list.

In the immediate aftermath of every scandal, Mr. Abe saw his popularity ratings dip. But he was always able to shake off the consequences within a few weeks, winning elections and in 2019 securing another three-year term as Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) leader.

Given the baroque levels of corruption that afflicted India-Indonesia-China, the charges against Mr. Abe and his fellow politicians could be spun as demonstrating how little leeway there was in Japan for transgressing laws. Was inviting a few friends to a cherry blossom party that bad? Was giving supporters a few mangoes and melons really heinous?

If these ‘gifts’ had been the whole iceberg of corruption in Japan, I’d probably answer in the negative. But there was widespread acknowledgement that they were merely the tip. In Japan there was a tendency to miss the woods for the trees by focusing on minor rules while ignoring larger transgressions.

 Politics in Japan was rife with nepotism.  Some 30 percent of the members of the Diet were nisei or second-generation parliamentarians with “inherited” seats. Among LDP MPs about 40 percent were nisei. And only three of the 30 post-war Prime Ministers of Japan had not had some kind of political lineage. Most, like Mr. Abe, were the children or grandchildren of former PMs and ministers. Japan’s democracy was based on a hereditary politics of privilege that was legitimised and reinforced by electoral politics, despite its feudal undertones.

Japan wasn’t unique in its ‘democratic fiefdoms,’ but its politics were more sclerotic than dynamic. The obsession of the country’s political elite with the past and its disconnect with the general electorate placed it in a disadvantageous position to achieve the flexibility and innovation that the twenty first century world called for, and that authoritarian China often seemed able to display.

***************

In August 2020 after a tumultuous few months, Shinzo Abe abruptly resigned a year ahead of schedule, citing ill health. His term as leader of the Liberal Democratic Party was supposed to have run until September 2021.

Assessments of his legacy vary depending on the subjectivities of the analyst.  Mr. Abe certainly enjoyed great power and status while in office. He was unafflicted by the forgettability that was the chief characteristic of the revolving door of five prime ministers lasting only about a year each that had preceded him. And yet, I believe he will only get a pass in the history books, though not with distinction. ‘A’ for longevity, but a ‘C,’ at most, for everything else.

When he had returned to power in 2012, Mr. Abe had made a set of economic reforms to stimulate the economy his priority. Popularly dubbed Abenomics, the three pillars of this stimulus included monetary easing, fiscal spending and deregulation to promote private investment. Fast-forward to the beginning of 2020 and the Japanese economy remained limp, even prior to the upheavals to come later in the year.  Japanese corporations had proved unable to transform themselves into twenty first century technology leaders. And although Japan had benefited from periods of economic growth and low unemployment under Mr. Abe, the country was still mired in a slow-growth, high-debt deflationary trap.

The Prime Minister’s plans to revive the economy had included an effort to bring more women into the work force, an attempt nicknamed “Womenomics”. But in the World Economic Forum’s annual Global Gender Gap Report 2020 Japan dropped to 121st place, the lowest among advanced economies, down 10 rungs from the previous year…

*****

---