If “a statesman is a politician who’s been dead ten or fifteen years”, as the late US president Harry S Truman once put it, Shinzo Abe made the transition long before his unexpected death last year. Yet the murky details surrounding his assassination – during an election campaign on July 8, 2022 – have raised questions of the former Japanese prime minister’s legacy.
His nine years in office, however, were too consequential for Mr Abe's legacy to remain sullied indefinitely. But its revival will depend, to some extent, on whether the current incumbent, Fumio Kishida, can deliver on his former boss’s long-cherished dream to make Japan a great military power again.
Mr Abe's legacy was presumably set in stone. By the time the 67-year old stepped down as Japan’s longest-serving prime minister in September 2020, the policies his government enacted had burnished Japan’s image on the global stage and given its stagnant economy a new lease of life. Mr Abe had also become something of a global statesman.
His assassination shocked the world as Japan is one of the safest countries, certainly for ordinary citizens venturing out at night, let alone high-profile politicians making public speeches in broad daylight.
Mr Abe's killing also brought to light links between his family and the Unification Church, a South Korean-based religious movement that has been described as everything from a cult to a CIA-sponsored front for anti-communist efforts in East Asia during the Cold War. Almost half of the national lawmakers in the governing Liberal Democratic Party, which Mr Abe led for almost a decade, are also believed to have had ties to the church. Favours are alleged to have been done in exchange for political donations.
The assassin, an unemployed former soldier, claimed that his family had been left destitute by the huge donations his mother made to the church. In his warped mind, Mr Abe was to blame for the church’s allegedly nefarious activities, including coercing members like his mother into making hefty contributions.
The assassination of a leader would leave any country in a state of shock and Japan was no different. But the public’s focus quickly shifted from profound loss to the alleged nexus between mainstream politics and organised religion. Some questioned why Mr Abe was given a state funeral, which is a rarity in Japan.
As the assassin’s life story garnered sympathy, public approval of Mr Kishida’s LDP government plummeted to below 40 per cent. This forced the prime minister to dismiss four cabinet members over alleged connections to the church, with speculation rife that eventually he would step down as well.
However, Mr Kishida has held on to power, in part for his government’s effective handling of the Covid-19 pandemic and its resumption of social and economic activities. He has also drawn praise for adopting a muscular security policy in the wake of the Ukraine conflict, which has caused anxiety in Japan given its own territorial disputes with Russia.
Mr Kishida's image has been further bolstered by his meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv in March and Japan’s hosting of the G7 summit in Hiroshima in May. Rapprochement with South Korea to assuage a relationship fraught with historical and territorial disputes has also been widely welcomed, given the two countries' shared concerns about a rising China and a belligerent North Korea.
A bump in Mr Kishida’s approval ratings has given him the bandwidth to begin the task of transforming Japan into a formidable military power, a key objective since he entered office in October 2021. This could also revive Mr Abe’s standing in the eyes of his compatriots, since it was his vision to project Japanese power by bolstering its defence capabilities.
As time passes, it is easy to forget that it was Mr Abe who articulated the “free and open Indo-Pacific” concept and outlined the Quad – a grouping comprised of Australia, India, Japan and the US – with a view to balance China. He also attempted to amend Article 9 of the Japanese constitution that would give its military the right to wage war even when the country is not perceived to be under attack.
These were ideas Mr Abe proposed back in 2007, as he sought to reduce Japan’s reliance on an increasingly unreliable US for its security.
Despite their political differences, on matters of national security Mr Kishida was always on the same page as Mr Abe, in whose cabinet he served as foreign minister. It is no surprise, then, that as prime minister, he has taken his former boss’s baton and run with it.
In December, he unveiled Japan’s biggest military build-up since the Second World War, which would increase defence spending to 2 per cent of gross domestic product by 2027. He is also deepening ties with Nato.
Still, rebuilding Japan’s military is a gargantuan task.
Mr Kishida has broad-based support for the build-up, but critics worry it will escalate an already heated arms race in East Asia. As a native of Hiroshima – one of two cities in the world to have been destroyed by an atom bomb – the prime minister has promised to work towards a world free of nuclear weapons. How he plans to do this even as he rearms Japan remains to be seen. Tokyo will also find it challenging to boost its defence while maintaining trade ties with an increasingly suspicious Beijing, which may not hesitate to retaliate with punitive economic measures.
The prime minister has domestic challenges to tackle, too, such as a declining birth rate and workplace gender inequality. His economic reforms, which include an emphasis on wealth redistribution, have yet to materialise. The public is also frustrated with politics, evidenced by consistently low voter turnouts and the LDP’s receding appeal among independents. Mr Kishida was himself the target of an assassination attempt in April, with the suspect believed to have earlier published a litany of grievances about Japan’s political system.
National security remains a priority, however, and with Mr Kishida being a less polarising figure than Mr Abe, some experts argue he is better placed to persuade voters to support moving Japan away from its post-war pacifist policy. Given how the two leaders’ legacies are joined at the hip, Mr Abe’s supporters will hope Mr Kishida can finish the job that the departed leader started more than 15 years ago.
