Japan's quiet successor vows to restore army
NORIMITSU ONISHI IN TOKYO
23-Sep-06 00:56 BST
SHINZO Abe is planning a revolution in Japan which will see the return of a full-strength imperial army for the first time since the Second World War.
After securing the Liberal Democratic Party's presidency last week, he is now certain to succeed Junichiro Koizumi as prime minister, and he clearly has an eye on re-examining the post-war era.
In a race that was his to lose, Abe - who will be Japan's first prime minister born after the Second World War - avoided specific comments about how he would pursue economic changes or how he would repair Japan's strained relations with China and South Korea.
Instead, he spoke of revising the United States-imposed Constitution, which forbids Japan from having a full-fledged military, passing legislation to allow Japanese troops to be deployed overseas and making it possible for Japan to exercise the right to collective self-defence with the US.
He also wants to revise the other legal document of the post-war American occupation, the Fundamental Law of Education, and emphasise moral values, patriotism and tradition in schools.
"By entrusting our national security to another country and putting a priority on economic development, we were indeed able to make great material gains," Abe wrote of the post-war era in his campaign book, Toward A Beautiful Country. "But what we lost spiritually - that was also great."
Abe, who will turn 52 on Thursday, received two-thirds of the votes in the election for the presidency of the Liberal Democratic Party last week. Because of the party's grip on the lower house of parliament, which chooses the prime minister, Abe is now assured of succeeding prime minister Junichiro Koizumi in a parliamentary session on Tuesday.
The emergence of a prime minister with no personal experience of the Second World War is considered a turning point in Japan, where the absence of a consensus on the war still troubles relations with the rest of Asia.
Considered politically inexperienced, Abe rose to political stardom by talking 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 Koizumi.
To his supporters, Abe is a politician unburdened by Japan's past, capable of forging a newly independent and strong path for the nation. To critics, he is a potentially dangerous ideologue ready to jettison the post-war values that have brought stability, peace and wealth to Japan.
Hakubun Shimomura, a Liberal Democratic lawmaker and an ally of Abe's, said the next prime minister would "look back objectively at the post-war period, removed from its trauma and able to make choices as part of the post-war 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, worries that Abe's greatest influence is from his grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, a wartime cabinet member imprisoned as a Class A war crimes suspect but never tried, who became prime minister in 1957. Recently, Abe has avoided commenting on Japan's wartime past.
Only five years ago, few would have predicted that Abe would become prime minister. He was known mainly as the grandson of Kishi and the son of Shintaro Abe, a former foreign minister, whom the son long served as secretary.
Abe took over his father's parliamentary seat in 1993 after Shintaro Abe's death, and became quite popular among voters, earning a reputation as a strong leader by voicing national anger at North Korea's admission in 2002 that it had kidnapped several Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 1980s. Since then, he has kept his hard line against North Korea, and against China. After North Korea launched missiles in July, he suggested that Japan debate whether it should acquire the military capacity for a pre-emptive strike.
One of Abe's most pressing problems will be to restore normal relations with China, which has refused to hold high-level talks because of Koizumi's annual visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, the Shinto memorial where 14 Class A war criminals are enshrined. The shrine, also a memorial to Japan's 2.5 million war dead, is considered a symbol of Japanese militarism in the rest of Asia.
The visits have worried American politicians that Japan is provoking China, and hurting American interests in the region. Abe, despite past support of the visits, has said he would pursue a policy of ambiguity, neither confirming nor denying whether he has visited the shrine.
On wartime history, Abe has allied himself with Japan's right-wing politicians, news media and scholars. Unlike Koizumi, he has doubted the validity of the post-war Tokyo trials in which Japan's wartime leaders were condemned.
In the past he has indicated that he rejects the mainstream, post-war view that Japan waged a war of aggression and invasion in Asia. But he has not publicly embraced the hard-line position 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.
Japanese hard-liners regard him as a true believer, while they looked askance at Koizumi for trying to negotiate with North Korea and for proposing to change the Imperial Household Law so that a woman could ascend the throne. While Koizumi made decisions on his own, dividing people between enemy and ally, Abe emphasises harmony.
"People tend to like Mr Abe's personality," Shimomura said. Lacking Koizumi's larger-than-life personality, Abe has instead cultivated a soft image that has taken the sharp edges off his strong views. Abe, a teetotaller who is married but has no children, appeared on a talk show to announce that his favourite food was ice cream.
"In his appearance and his way of speaking, he's soft," Shimomura said. "But in the inside, he's rock solid. He sticks to his principles and won't compromise."
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