Above Photo: Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe reacts during a news conference at the prime minister’s official residence in Tokyo, Japan, August 28, 2020. Franck Robichon/Pool via Reuters.
Last night some man with a self build gun killed the former prime minister of Japan Shinzo Abe.
Adhering to family tradition Shinzo Abe has been an Japanese imperialist. As Peter Lee wrote about him back in 2013:
Myth: Shinzo Abe is a leading member of the team of world and Asian democracies standing up to China in the name of universal values like “freedom of navigation” and to help ensure the shared peace and prosperity of Asia.
Reality: Shinzo Abe is a revisionist nationalist using friction with China to pursue Japanese national interests, put Japan on the right side of a zero-sum economic equation opposite the PRC, maximize Japan’s independence of action as a regional hegemon, hopefully peacefully, but if not…
Mission for the Western media: Manage the cognitive dissonance between comforting myth and disturbing reality for the sake of its faithful readers.
Challenge: Explain away Prime Minister Abe’s Boxing Day visit to the Yasukuni Shrine.
Some of the most monstrous Class A war criminals of the second word war, which include Abe’s grandfather, were buried at the Yasukuni Shrine. The shrine and its attached museum are off-limits for most Japanese politicians. But Shinzo Abe prominently visited it because he carried the ideology of those who are buried there:
The core of Abe’s historical revisionism is not just that the bandit-infested territories of China and Korea demanded Japanese tutelage in the 1930s and 1940s, but also that the Japanese Empire was leading the fight of the oppressed peoples of Asia against British colonialism and American imperialism—in other words, the real war crime of World War II was U.S. aggression against Japan. The United States, and its pretensions to moral superiority over Japan, as well as China and Korea’s presumptuous claims to virtuous victimhood, were a target of Abe’s Yasukuni visit.
His policies of furthering militarism and conflict, especially with China and both Koreas, while making nice with Russia were born out of that ideology.
Shinzo Abe’s last stint as prime minister lasted eight years. That was astonishing long as prime ministers in Japan only rarely serve longer than one year. It requires special qualities to politically survive as long as Shinzo Abe did.
Gun crimes in Japan are extremely rare. Of the dozen a year that actually happen most are between rivaling groups of the Japanese mafia, the Jakuza.
The Japanese police will likely find that the gunman was a ‘lone individual’. That may well be, but there are certainly others who will gain from the incident. As William Pesek writes in Asia Times:
Though the motives and longer-term implications of this attack are impossible to assess, one political dynamic may have been altered: Prime Minister Fumio Kishida may now have greater latitude to stay on past his one-year mark in office come October.
Even though the Abe camp denied it, Tokyo was abuzz with chatter that Abe, who stepped down in September 2020, might toss his hat in the ring for a third stint as leader. Abe first served as premier from 2006 to 2007, then from 2012 to 2020.
Abe had been playing a behind-the-scenes kingmaker role since resigning. Speculation was rife that he was unhappy seeing Kishida walk back Abe’s signature efforts at detente with Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Abe also reportedly disliked the optics of Kishida pledging to reform, at long last, Asia’s No 2 economy, the implication being that so-called “Abenomics” failed to put Japan on a more vibrant path.
Japanese prime ministers don’t tend to last more than 12 months. Abe’s eight-year run was a stark outlier. Suffice to say, Kishida will not need to be looking over his shoulder at Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) powerbroker Abe. This Sunday’s upper house elections are likely to give Kishida a firmer grip over his factional party, allowing him to emerge from the shadow of leaders past.
Kishida’s policies are otherwise mostly in line with Abe’s. He wants a strong militaristic Japan that can project power abroad. The U.S. is furthering that as it helps with its anti-China policies. But it should be careful what it wishes for.
Japan is a latent nuclear power as it has stored quite a bit of uranium and plutonium:
Japan has 47.8 tons of high sensitive separated plutonium., 10.8 tons of which are stored in Japan, enough to make 1350 nuclear warheads. In addition, Japan also has about 1.2 tons of highly-enriched uranium (HEU) for research reactors.
The country has the knowhow to handle such material. In a crisis situation it could quickly build nuclear bombs. Japan has long range delivery vehicles due to its space program. Once unleashed a revisionist Japan would be a danger, not only for its immediate neighbors, but for the U.S. itself.
Chian and both Koreas will be relieved that Shinzo Abe, the capable revisionist, is gone.
I wonder at which shrine his ashes will be buried.