Abe’s rise to force new look at postwar Japan
By Norimitsu Onishi The New York Times

Published: September 20, 2006

After securing the Liberal Democratic Party’s presidency Wednesday, Shinzo Abe will become Japan’s first prime minister born after the end of World War II, with a clear eye toward re-examining the postwar era.

Abe said he wanted to revise the U.S.- imposed, pacifist Constitution that formed the basis for Japan’s postwar development. He also wants to revise quickly the other legal document of the postwar American occupation, the Fundamental Law of Education, and stress moral values, patriotism and tradition in schools.

"How was Japan’s postwar era?" Abe said in his campaign book, "Toward a Beautiful Country," in which he describes himself as a "fighting politician."

"By entrusting our national security to another country and putting a priority on economic development, we were indeed able to make great material gains. But what we lost spiritually - that was also great."

The emergence of a prime minister with no personal experience of the war is considered a significant turning point in Japan, where the absence of a national consensus on the war continues to trouble relations with the rest of Asia.

Considered politically inexperienced, Abe, who will turn 52 Thursday and will also become postwar Japan’s youngest prime minister, rose to political stardom in the past four years by being tough on North Korea, China and national security. In Japan and in the rest of Asia, Abe is regarded as even more hawkish and conservative than his predecessor, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi.

To supporters, Abe is a politician unburdened by Japan’s past, capable of forging a new independent and strong path for the nation. To critics, he is a potentially dangerous ideologue ready to jettison postwar values that have brought stability, peace and wealth to Japan.

Hakubun Shimomura, a Liberal Democratic lawmaker and close ally of Abe’s, said that the next prime minister would "look back objectively at the postwar period, removed from its trauma and able to make choices as part of the postwar generation.

"I think the symbolic start of the independent nation of Japan will be Abe’s revision of the Constitution," Shimomura said.

But Shusei Tanaka, a professor at Fukuyama University and a former Liberal Democratic lawmaker, said he worried that Abe’s greatest influence was from his grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, a wartime cabinet member who was imprisoned as a Class A war crimes suspect but was never tried and who became prime minister in 1957. Recently, Abe has studiously avoided commenting on Japan’s wartime past.

"As soon as he becomes prime minister, this will be the focus of attention from inside and outside the country," Tanaka said. "He can’t keep saying he won’t talk about it. If you think the war was unavoidable, that means you evaluate the prewar workings of the country in a positive light."

Only half a decade ago, few would have predicted that Abe would become prime minister. He was known mainly for being the grandson of Kishi and the son of Shintaro Abe, a former foreign minister, whom the son long served as secretary.

After Abe took over his father’s parliamentary seat in 1993 following Shintaro Abe’s death, he joined parliamentary groups that advocated conservative causes. He united with lawmakers who lobbied the prime minister to visit the Yasukuni Shrine, the Shinto memorial where Japan’s war dead, including some war criminals, are enshrined, and urged that school textbooks be rewritten to emphasize national pride and remove mention of wartime facts like the sexual abuse of women by the Japanese military.

But Abe became extremely popular among voters, and earned his reputation as a strong leader, by articulating national anger at North Korea’s admission in 2002 over its kidnapping of several Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 1980s. Since then, he has kept his hardline stance against the North, as well as against China, suggesting after North Korea’s missile tests last July that Japan should debate acquiring the military capacity for a pre-emptive strike.

On Japan’s wartime history, Abe has allied himself with the nation’s rightist politicians, media and scholars. Unlike Koizumi, he has cast doubt on the validity of the postwar Tokyo trials in which Japan’s wartime leaders were condemned.

He has indicated strongly that he rejects the mainstream, postwar view that Japan waged a war of aggression and invasion in Asia - though he has not publicly taken the argument a step further by arguing that Japan waged war in Asia to liberate it from Western imperialism. Unlike Koizumi and other prime ministers, Abe, though pressed many times, has avoided endorsing a landmark apology issued in 1995 by the Japanese government to Asian countries.

In a parliamentary debate last February, Abe was asked whether he acknowledged that Japan had waged a war of invasion in Asia. He responded that it "is not the government’s job" to evaluate that war.

"Indeed, I think we should leave it to historians to judge," Abe said, repeating a line he has used often to avoid expressing his real views.

Japanese hard-liners regard him as a true believer, after looking askance at Koizumi for trying to negotiate with North Korea and for proposing a change in the Imperial Household Law so that a woman could ascend the throne.

"Mr. Abe is more firm than Mr. Koizumi," said Hisahiko Okazaki, a former diplomat and an adviser to Abe. "Mr. Koizumi is a person who goes by what his gut tells him, whereas Mr. Abe goes by philosophy and conviction."

"Because it’s not from conviction," Okazaki said of Koizumi, "sometimes he’ll cater to the left wing. That way, somehow he thinks his popularity will increase. Even about Yasukuni, he’s said, ’People who went to war against their will.’ Mr. Abe follows his philosophy, so he would never say that from the start."

In style, Abe is different from his predecessor. While Koizumi was a lone wolf who made decisions on his own, dividing people between enemies and allies, Abe stresses harmony.

"People tend to like Abe’s personality," Shimomura said.

"He’s not the type to be disliked."

Lacking Koizumi’s larger-than-life personality, Abe has instead cultivated a soft image that has taken the sharp edges off his hard-line views. Abe, who is married but has no children, appeared on a television talk show to announce that his favorite food is ice cream.

"In his appearance and his way of speaking, he’s soft," Shimomura said, adding: "But in the inside, he’s rock solid. He sticks to his principles and won’t compromise."