Obituary: Shinzo Abe 1954-2022

TOKYO — The shooting death of Shinzo Abe, the former Prime Minister of Japan, has shocked the nation. Abe was making a campaign speech for a Liberal Democratic Party candidate for the House of Councilors on Friday morning, July 8, in Nara, when he was attacked by a man who emerged from the crowd wielding a homemade device that resembled a double-barreled shotgun.

The man somehow managed to get within several feet of Abe, despite the presence of a Security Police team and shoot him in the shoulder and neck. Abe collapsed to the ground as the SP immediately subdued the assailant. Medical attendants found Abe’s heart had stopped and their resuscitation efforts failed. He was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital several hours later. Media coverage of the event has dominated the news ever since.

I had always liked Abe, personally, if not exactly his agenda. He was Japan’s longest serving Prime Minister at 8 years and 8 months as leader of the ruling conservative LDP, the party that has been in power for most of the postwar era. He had a nice, friendly, natural way about him and seemed totally at ease in his job, be it at local party events or National Diet hearings. In contrast to many other Japanese leaders who seemed uncomfortable and out of place at G-7 meetings and other international gatherings, he looked like he belonged. He was a credit to the nation of Japan.

However, as I noted in my book Tokyo Junkie, during Abe’s years in office, his government pushed an unabashedly pro-nationalist agenda, one that involved new antiterrorism laws limiting public protests, the muting of criticism of Japan’s wartime excesses, and a sustained effort to revise Japan’s constitution, which bans the maintenance of a standing army (Japan’s Self-Defense Forces are already the eighth-largest military in the world). He pushed for legislation that permitted Japanese troops to fight overseas for the first time.

As Japan legal expert Lawrence Repeta noted, the Abe administration achieved great success in expanding police power, passing legislation LDP leaders had sought for decades. They expanded wiretapping authority, formally recognized plea bargaining, expanded state secrecy powers, and passed legislation creating the crime of “conspiracy.”

“The Abe team managed to achieve all this,” Repeta said, “despite opposition from the bar associations, much of the news media and public intelligentsia, and tens of thousands of protesters that repeatedly gathered before the Diet. This a tremendous record of achievement.” He was not being complimentary.

Under Abe Japan’s rankings in the World Press Freedom Index dropped significantly. In 2016, Abe’s Communications Minister threatened to shut down media  broadcasting outlets over politically biased reports — prompting an outcry from famed reporter Soichi Tahara and other leading journalists and statements of “deep and genuine concern” by U.N. special rapporteur David Kaye about declining media independence in the world’s third largest economy.

In 2019, NHK boss Katsuto Momii decreed after assuming office that his news network, which is technically supposed to be politically neutral, should not criticize the government. (This is not to say there is no real press freedom in Japan. It can be found with the weekly and monthly magazines, like Gekan Bungei Bungei, Shukan Bunshun, and the monthly magazine Facta. They exist outside the daily newspapers and television networks which operate under a strictly controlled Kisha club system. For example, Facta reported that the Abe government surveilled the lawyer who had helped the aforementioned Kaye while in Japan, while giving the UN rep the cold shoulder.)

Prime Minister Abe had resigned as PM in late August 2020, at age 65, claiming ill health. His approval rating stood at 34 percent. Poor handling of the coronavirus including a slow rollout of the vaccine and the accumulation of scandals involving his administration, his critics said, had proven too much for even him, the latest of them a vote-buying scheme that led to the arrest and indictment of Abe’s former justice minister and his wife, a member of the House of Councilors.

Foremost among the scandals was a shady real estate deal involving Abe and his wife Akie and the owner of the Moritomo Gakuen. It included forged documents that eliminated passages implicating Abe, the suicide of a Finance Ministry official who had been ordered to doctor them, and a lawsuit by the official’s widow who accused the government of a coverup.

Abe’s long-serving finance minister was Taro Aso, himself a former prime minister whose father had forced Allied prisoners of war to work in his mining company during World War II. Aso, known for his bizarre love of manga, was famous for his bigoted views, praising Japan for having only “one ethnic group” and criticizing women who do not give birth. Yet not once during his eight years at the helm of the ministry was his job ever in danger, not even during the height of the aforementioned forged document/suicide scandal.

Abe was able to serve as long as he did thanks to his loyal supporters, but in the end, the pandemic did him in. His government faced brutal criticism over a number of issues in addition to the inexcusable delay in vaccine availability. The distribution of washable cloth facemasks, which arrived too late and turned out to be too small, was one of them.

Abe came from a prominent political family in Japan that had its own share of scandals and shady maneuvers. His maternal grandfather was Nobosuke Kishi, the former Class-A war crimes suspect turned American puppet and CIA favorite. Kishi, had been a member of Hideki Tojo’s wartime cabinet, responsible for forced labor and sexual slavery policies in China as well as the expansion of the opium trade, before selling out to the Americans in the postwar era.

He was released from Sugamo Prison, where he had been held for three years awaiting trial, on Dec. 23, 1948, the same day that General Tojo and six others were hanged. As prime minister in 1960, a position he attained with the help of donations from the CIA, he oversaw the approval of the Security Treaty extension that would keep American bases in Japan, using yakuza manpower to overcome massive resistance from protestors.  

Kishi was also the victim of an assassination attempt in 1960 as he prepared to leave office. He was attacked by a 65-year-old disgruntled right-winger outside the official residence of the Prime Minister. The assailant, reportedly angered over the handling of the Security Treaty demonstrations in which a Tokyo University student had been trampled to death, stabbed Kishi in the thigh six times before being subdued. Kishi lost considerable blood but survived, after receiving 30 stitches to close his wounds.  Some people close to Kishi belived the attacker had been hired by a rival political group.

Kishi’s brother was the big-eared Eisaku Sato, who was also Prime Minister of Japan, from 1965-1972. During his tenure Sato was engulfed in his own string of corruption scandals erupting in 1966 that earned him the nickname the “Black Mist.” Among the more celebrated malfeasances were the arrest of a lower house LDP MP on charges of bribery; Sato’s transportation minister arranging for an express train to stop at the tiny station in his hometown; the head of the Self-Defense Forces taking private trips on YS-11 planes; the speaker of the lower house dealing in fraudulent bank drafts (tegata); and LDP Diet members extorting businessmen for money.

Public opinion of Sato was low. Were it not for the parliamentary system of Japan, in which the head of the ruling party becomes prime minister, a result of the factional power play of LDP kingmakers behind closed doors, there is little chance he could have ever been chosen prime minister. He certainly could not have won in a direct election such as that held for the presidency of the United States.

Famed Yomiuri Shimbun reporter Tsuneo Watanabe once described to me in detail how he thought Sato won the post of prime minister. In 1964, former Prime Minister Hayato Ikeda, suffering from throat cancer, had been compelled to resign because of his failing health. It was decided by party officials that, rather than endure a difficult intraparty factional battle over his successor, it would be better for Ikeda to choose the next party president — who would automatically become PM — himself. The logical choice was Ichiro Kono, the man who had organized the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and who was close to Ikeda. The PM, who was unable to speak because of his illness, wrote down the name of his successor, Kono, on a piece of paper, folded it, and handed it to an aide.

“Somewhere along the line,” said Watanabe, “the paper was intercepted, made to disappear, a large amount of money changed hands, and a new piece of paper appeared with Sato’s name on it. I am deadly serious. Maybe I could not prove it in court, but I know it happened.”

Corruption in the Sato regime was a frequent target of Watanabe’s columns, and he told me that Sato’s wife had once visited his wife with a gift — an envelope full of money. It was a not-so-subtle hint that she might suggest to her husband to ease off on his attacks on the PM’s office. Watanabe’s wife, an endlessly good-natured and kind-hearted lady, of course refused.

In November 1966, Sato went on television and announced his candidacy for a second term as party president, on the theory that only he could best correct the unsavory situation. “It is regrettable that my administration and party have invited public distrust for lack of moral standards,” he said. “The main thing is that I, as the responsible person, fully grasp the implications.”

No one doubted that he would win, which in fact he did in the December party election.

Sato was the one responsible for Watanabe’s transfer to Washington D.C. The Yomiuri Shimbun had wanted to buy land for a new building and a government official agreed to facilitate the purchase in exchange for Yomiuri getting Watanabe out of Sato’s hair.

Gun violence is rare in Japan thanks to strict Sword and Firearms laws, However, Japanese political history is filled with assassinations and assassination attempts. In 1960, Japan Socialist Party head Inejiro Asanuma was stabbed to death in the middle of a speech by a crazed right wing assailant. Prime Minister Takeo Miki, Deputy Prime Minister Shin Kanemaru and Prime Minister Morihiro Hokosawa all survived assassination attempts. Nagasaki Mayor Hitoshi Nakanishi was shot by an ultra-nationalist in 1990 but survived. However, another Nagasaki mayor, Itcho Ito, was shot and killed while campaigning in 2007 by a gangster..

Shinzo Abe was born in 1954 in Tokyo and recalled playing at his grandfather’s knee during the aforementioned Security Treaty demonstrations. His father Shintaro Abe, also an LDP politician, served in the Diet for over three decades and held cabinet posts as Foreign Minister and Minister for International trade and Industry. Shinzo Abe was elected to the House of Representatives after his father’s death in 1991 and was inaugurated Prime Minster in 2006. He resigned in 2007 after the LDP suffered a major defeat in the Upper House election. He also suffered from ulcerative colitis  that reportedly made lengthy cabinet meetings difficult.

He was re-elected LDP president in 2012, reassuming the post of Prime Minister. He implemented a growth policy designed to counter Japan’s economic stagnation dubbed Abenomics by the press that was met with mixed results.

In preparation for 2020 Tokyo Olympics, the Abe  government unveiled a new pro-tourism policy — the go-to catch phrase being “omotenashi” (hospitality) — with the nation’s major corporations allowed to attach the name “Tokyo 2020” to their advertising in exchange for extravagant donations to the cause.

The 2020 Games were supposed to have been a key component of Abenomics. Instead, however, right from the start, preparations were plagued by embarrassing cost overruns, ineffective leadership, finger-pointing at all levels, and widespread doubts that a seemingly inept Japanese government would have everything ready in time. (I outlined these difficulties in Tokyo Junkie, a five-part series for the Japan Times in 2014, and again in a collaboration with the former U.S. Embassy advisor and physicist David Roberts as a feature article in Foreign Policy, with a translated version run as a cover story in the Japanese edition of Newsweek. Government representatives accused us of undermining the games.)

The games were postponed until 2021 because of the pandemic and held with the athletes confined to a restrictive bubble.

Throughout the course of his career in power Abe maintained the respect of global leaders and was considered a major player in global politics. He was known as a staunch defender of the U.S.-Japan alliance, and promoted alliances with Australia and India. He was also described as a right-wing nationalist and a denier of Japan’s war crimes, who professed irritation at unflattering descriptions of Kishi and Sato.

Abe’s assassin was a former member of Japan’s Maritime Self-Defense Force, and was believed to be a religious zealot. His motives were unclear.

Jeff Kingston, a political expert who teaches at Temple University in Tokyo, called Shinzo Abe a “political giant,” upon learning of his death.

Further reading: Tokyo Junkie

https://www.stonebridge.com/catalog-2020/Tokyo-Junkie