New Prime Minister for Japan: business as usual

Japan has a new Prime Minister who seems eager to foster nationalism. We look at his policies for furthering the interests of the Japanese capitalism.

Koizumi's five and a half year reign as Prime Minister came to a voluntary end in September. He tossed the keys to the official residence to his protege Shinzo Abe after a summer farewell tour that included a pilgrimage to Graceland and a visit to Yasukuni Shrine to pay his respects to the war criminals and their cannon fodder said to spiritually reside there. On September 20, Abe ('ah-bay') was elected President of the Liberal Democratic Party, and six days later the Upper and Lower houses of the Diet approved him as Prime Minister. This quick and easy process, free of public participation and the unpleasant prying from clenched fingers etcetera, must have an envious Gordon Brown shaking his head in disbelief.

Born to rule

A third-generation politician, like so many others in the LDP, Abe has long regarded the top governmental post as his birthright. His grandfather Nobusuke Kishi became Prime Minister in 1957, culminating an amazing political comeback after having served a three-year prison sentence as a 'class-A' war criminal for his wartime role as Minister of Commerce and Industry. The US occupational authorities let Kishi off the hook, enlisting his aid in the fight against commies, but the Japanese people were less forgiving and finally drove him from office in 1960 through massive protests against the US-Japan Security Treaty. Kishi's son-in-law Shintaro Abe, father of Shinzo, was expected to become Prime Minister himself one day. In the early 1980s he rose as high as Foreign Minister, but a corruption scandal and terminal cancer brought his political career to an end.

Shinzo Abe's own political career got started in 1982, when his father suddenly ordered him to quit his job at Kobe Steel and become his executive assistant at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. In 1993 Abe was elected, in typical LDP fashion, to the same Diet seat his father had held until his death two years earlier. It soon became clear that Abe would become Prime Minister one day, and this became an absolute certainty in 2005 when Koizumi appointed him Chief Cabinet Secretary, after he had been the Deputy Chief Cabinet secretary since the Mori administration.

Koizumi helped Abe tremendously by appointing him to head the negotiations with North Korea to return Japanese citizens abducted in the late seventies and early eighties, along with their families. Being at the centre of this highly publicized issue, which has become the cause celebre of the rightwing in Japan, has brought Abe great public recognition. He has pointed to his own hard-line stance towards negotiations with North Korea as an example of how he is a 'fighting politician.' In his book Utsukushii kuni he (Towards a Beautiful Country), published in July, he defines this term as a politician who 'will act without fear of criticism if it is for the good of the nation and its people.' Abe points to the abduction issue as an example of his fighting skills, suggesting that it took great courage on his part to lead this struggle: 'Many Diet members told me that I had their support, but only a few of them actually took action with me. It's a shame that there were so few ‘fighting politicians,' but that's always the way it is in any era.' Here Abe is laying it on a bit thick, as if it took great courage to latch on to an issue that already had strong public support and media backing.