Abe's Impact
Weighing and measuring the legacy of contemporary Japan's most consequential leader following his shocking asssassination.
Bias Watch:
As a recovering U.S. government intelligence analyst, one whose job it was to consider what impact, if any, developments outside the borders of our country had on U.S. interests, it’s important I note that that mode of thinking may still color my conception of foreign affairs. Drawing on my fair personal knowledge of Japanese culture and politics, I have tried my upmost to analyze Abe’s legacy through the lens of how successful he was in advancing Japan’s national interests. But cognitive biases are a tricky thing.
And as I’ve seen in the many op-eds, tributes, and obituaries written by foreign policy elites and current and former U.S. officials alike in the wake of Abe’s assassination, one often runs the risk of mirror-imaging. Of projecting American preferences, interests, and decision-making drivers unto Japan, ignoring any extant cultural differences that may explain departures in perspectives or thinking on major issues.
In some respects, you can get away with it when talking about Japan, since Japan’s interests are perhaps aligned more closely to those of the U.S. than any other American ally – a testament to the outsized role the U.S.-Japan Alliance has played in Japan’s post-World War II national character.
But wouldn’t it be nice if journalists, essayists, and editorial boards at least tried to identify and check their biases at the door?
It seems our body politic would be better equipped to wade through the political and ideological spin that typifies much of our media landscape to make sense of our complex world if more of us did so.
As always, thank you for reading.
-JH
Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (AH-Bay), the nation’s longest-serving post-war leader, was shot and killed by a 41-year-old Japanese assailant earlier this month while campaigning on behalf of a party colleague ahead of legislative elections. It’s an unfathomable end to the life of a towering political figure in Japan, a country with famously low levels of gun violence (Japan, with its giant population of 126 million, notched just one—yes one—gun homicide in 2021), no less violent crime of any kind. That Abe (with the apparent blessing from his security detail) felt comfortable delivering his political stump speech within feet of supporters unseparated by the sort of barricades or men in cheap black suits with fingers seemingly glued to their earpieces that are a mainstay in U.S. political rallies is a testament to the famously mild-mannered and orderly nature of Japanese politics and society.
The same low-threat atmosphere that allowed Abe to raise and sustain his popularity through impromptu, often intimate, public appearances dealt him his death blow. However improbable the shooting, it seems he became a victim of complacency. It will be interesting to see what effect this tragic event has on Japan’s domestic security apparatus and its laxed campaign culture. Authorities have yet to articulate a clear motive for the shooting (results of a formal investigation are still pending), though local press has circulated rumors that the suspect believed Abe had connections to a religious group he blamed for soliciting heaps of donations from his mother that resulted in her bankruptcy.
For Asia watchers like myself, this is surreal moment. Since 2012, the year he began his second—and ultimately record-long—stint as Prime Minister (he served his first stint from 2006-2007, a tenure he cut short amid his party’s unpopularity and his ulcerative colitis flaring up to an unmanageable level), Abe has occupied center-stage of seemingly every event, debate, conversation, and conception involving Japan. Or at least, that’s how it has seemed. A reader of western media over the past decade was hard-pressed to find reporting on Japan that did not include at least a passing reference to Abe. And I’m not just talking about articles dealing with political developments in Japan. I’m talking virtually any and every story having to do with the country, no matter how seemingly impertinent (or downright ridiculous) the headline. Like this piece on Japanese robots. Or this one on a Japanese municipality’s effort to coax its elderly citizens to give up their drivers licenses with offers of discounted ramen. Or this one on how Japanese virgins are threatening the countries’ credit rating. That was the sort of gravitas this decisive and transformative leader imbued. He permeated every nook and cranny of Japanese culture.
Even after his sudden resignation in 2020—a decision ostensibly made on account of his ulcerative colitis flaring up yet again—he commanded enormous attention as a powerbroker and influential voice behind the scenes of Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), leading the party’s largest faction in the lower house of Japan’s bicameral National Diet (their version of Congress, one stark difference being that unlike in the U.S. where the upper house—the Senate—yields more power than the lower house – the House of Representatives, in Japan the lower house reigns supreme). His power and influence afforded him the privilege to basically hand-pick his immediate successor, Yoshihide Suga. When Suga later fell on the sword of COVID (he became deeply unpopular due to his perceived mishandling of the pandemic) and announced he would not run for reelection last October, this political heft allowed Abe to angle to ensure Fumio Kishida, Japan’s current leader, became prime minister and not his longtime intra-party rival, Taro Kono.
Unshackled by the constraints of the premiership, Abe also became outspoken on controversial issues, toeing—and often crossing—the conventional line on major issues in ways that would otherwise raise eyebrows had he voiced such opinions from the prime minister’s podium. In the immediate wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, he called for the Japanese public to consider allowing the U.S. to rotationally base nuclear weapons on Japanese soil in a manner similar to NATO’s nuclear sharing arrangements as a means to bolster deterrence against its bellicose neighbors, China and North Korea. In a country where any mention of nuclear weapons is seen as taboo, this was a bold statement to make (Japan is the only country on earth to have experienced a nuclear attack; in 2011 it became doubly unlucky when its nuclear power plant in Fukushima experienced a meltdown that created a large-scale radiological disaster, second only to Chernobyl). But only Abe could make it.
In an op-ed he penned for the Los Angeles Times in April he called for the U.S. to end its policy of strategic ambiguity on Taiwan by stating in no uncertain terms that it would intervene military to defend Taiwan should China mount an invasion. Months prior, he suggested Japan would have no choice but join forces with the U.S. military in such a contingency, reasoning that Japan, whose western-most territory sits just 60 miles from Taiwan, would also naturally fall within Beijing’s crosshairs. "A Taiwan emergency is a Japanese emergency, and therefore an emergency for the Japan-U.S. alliance. People in Beijing, President Xi Jinping in particular, should never… [misunderstand this]," Abe declared. Yet another bold claim to make. One that, had Abe been prime minister when he said it, could have placed Japan on the receiving end of economic, diplomatic, or potentially grey-zone military retaliatory measures of some form from Beijing.
This was to be his role until the end of his life – his using his outsized voice to say things others couldn’t to push the bureaucracy in the direction he thought necessary to improve Japan’s security and advance its strategic interests. That is unless he was to take yet another go at the premiership, which was certainly not out of the question. Deaths are always harder to process when you know the person had yet more prophecies to fulfill.
Judging by the outpouring of condolences from every corner of the world following his killing, this appears to be a universally held feeling. Every living U.S. president (save Jimmy Carter, the only living “former” to have not interacted with Abe when he was in office) from George W. Bush to Biden released statements expressing shock and sorrow over Abe’s death. Biden—in a rare act of respect for a former leader of another country—ordered flags at all federal buildings to half-mast. Trump, hardly one to speak positively of U.S. allies, whom he often viewed through a transactional lens (“they’re free riders!”), released an eloquent and heartfelt tribute to the fallen leader via his social media platform Truth Social. Members of congress from both parties expressed sorrow. World leaders from the United Kingdom to Ukraine, India to Fiji followed suit. The United Nations Security Council held a moment of silence in Abe’s honor. Even China, a country that certainly had its fair share of differences with Abe, expressed “shock and despair” over his killing. Chinese President Xi Jinping later released a statement saying he “deeply regret[ed] his sudden death.”
Not many former world leaders could command this sort of international reaction.
Here I will explore why Abe is deserving of this outpouring of goodwill from every corner of the globe and why I think he’s worthy of the moniker “modern Japan’s most consequential leader.” In so doing I will also identify areas where his leadership and agenda fell short, missed the mark, or at times otherwise led his country astray.
Pulling Japan out of the Doldrums
Great leaders have grand visions. Visions that often seem unassailable. Visions that, to many, look like a work of fantasy or naïveté. Abe had a grand vision.
And while his life was cut short before he could see his full vision come to fruition, he achieved far more than any pundits, or even East Asia scholars, thought possible. As the notoriously overused, yet perfectly fitting saying by Oscar Wilde goes, “Shoot for the moon. Even of you miss, you’ll land among the stars.” Abe had the perseverance and political acumen to take his country to new post-WWII heights. And Japan stands taller in his wake.
His overarching vision was to restore Japan to a place of relevance on the world stage. Not to the uninhibited militarism of 1940s Imperial Japan as reductive passers-by and dramatists often contended, and China and North Korea—regional foes—and sometimes even South Korea—a former Japanese colony—propagandized. But to a country no longer kneecapped by the sins of its history that, like Germany, Japan’s European contemporary, could use its instruments of national power unabashedly like any other to pursue its strategic interests. A country where its politicians no longer had to reflexively apologize every time reporters peppered them with a question that remotely alluded to WWII. A country, as Abe put it, that was “normal,” no longer bogged down by stipulations of a post-war constitution forced on it by the U.S. that mandated Japan “forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation,” and placed strict limitations on its military’s freedom of action.
And that was the apple of his grand vision – to amend this stipulation in the Japanese Constitution and legitimize the Japan Self-Defense Force (as Tokyo terms its military) as a military that could project power like any other rather than remain a passive entity that could only be spurred to action if it were attacked first by an aggressor. Situated in a tense neighborhood that featured the likes of a saber-rattling North Korea that tested nuclear-capable missiles that overflew the Japanese archipelago, a resurgent Russia, and a rising China intent on flexing its muscles and reviving territorial disputes, Japan needed to do so in order to safeguard its security in Abe’s estimation.
Ironically, this was something the U.S. had pushed Japan to do just one year after it imposed the pacifist constitution in 1947 as Washington quickly turned its focus to the Soviet Union, soliciting all the help it could get from its newfound allies to contain the red menace. But, in a surprising example of U.S. nation-building actually working, the peace-striving tone of the document had already taken root in a Japanese society exhausted from war and looking for a stable future, so Tokyo demurred.
In the decades since—and up until this day—this became a regular source of friction, with the U.S. on one side asking Japan to take on a larger role militarily under the U.S.-Japan Alliance, and Japan on the other side looking back stupefied, saying in effect: “Dude – you’re the reason we can’t do more.” Constitutionally barred from contributing troops to the U.S.-led coalition in the 1990 Gulf War, Tokyo provided the only thing it could: financial aid, to the tune of 13 billion dollars. At a time when U.S. suspicions of Japan as a mercurial partner—one that many believed was on the precipice of overtaking the U.S. as the world’s number one economy—the move came as a disappointment Washington. Abe, a rising young lawmaker in the National Diet at the time, was embarrassed that Japan, a country that imported 90% of its oil from the Middle East (and thus had a very real stake seeing the coalition win), could not do more.
To be fair, Abe’s vision for a Japan with a respectable military and a more proactive foreign policy was not entirely original. The scion of a political dynasty, his grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, advocated for an overhaul of the war-renouncing constitution to no avail in the late 1950s when he himself was prime minister. Abe’s father, Shintaro Abe, Japan’s foreign minster in the early 1980s, similarly advocated for a strong Japan on the international stage. But Abe’s efforts to advance this agenda got nowhere in his first term (2006-2007), in large part because the public remained fixated on improving economic conditions in Japan that had remained moribund ever since the great asset bubble burst of 1992. Economic policy was an area Abe acknowledged he lacked expertise in.
Good leaders identify their blind spots and delegate responsibilities to experts that can attend to those blind spots. Great leaders take the time to get smart on those bind spots and work hand in hand with those experts.
It was his “time in the wilderness” after this embarrassing first premiership came to an end—as Tobias Harris, a prominent Japan watcher, notes—that Abe came to the epiphany that if he wanted to pull Japan’s military and foreign policy establishment out of its post-war paralysis, he would first have to remedy his country’s economic paralysis. In 2012, he won his second term as prime minister on the back of a three-pronged economic proposal which included unprecedented economic stimulus, monetary easing, and structural reforms intended to do just that. The program, which later gained the nickname “Abenomics,” succeeded in reducing unemployment to record lows, delivering record-earnings for companies, and boosting worker’s wages after more than a decade of stagnation. While economists debate whether the program achieved one of its primary goals of generating sustained deflation, it nevertheless had jolted the sleepy economy in the direction of growth and delivered very real dividends to voters.
Buoyed by the popularity of this program, his party—the LDP—dominated at the ballot box. Abe himself retained high marks among the rank-and-file of his party, thus securing his reelection in 2014, then another in 2017. By proving he had the chops to tackle domestic issues and deliver electoral victories, he finally had the political capital to devote to foreign and defense policy.
In 2013, Abe established Japan’s National Security Council (NSC)—one modeled after the U.S.’ own NSC—which centralized foreign and defense decision-making in the Kantei (Japan’s White House) and forced the shapeshifting bureaucracy to become more answerable to the prime minister. (For those complaining of a “deep state” in the U.S., I urge you to take a look under the hood of pre-Abe Japan, where career bureaucrats really ruled the roost).
In 2015, he passed landmark legislation that reinterpreted Japan’s constitution to permit the Japan Self-Defense Force (JSDF) to engage in “collective self-defense.” Under this reinterpretation, Japan could come to defense of its ally—the United States—in the event a foreign power or non-state group were to initiate hostilities against it. This measure was to serve as a necessary prequel to full revision of the war-renouncing constitution until he had the requisite supermajority (two-thirds) in the Diet, a political feat that alluded him for the remainder of his tenure. But up until his death, he was working behind the scenes to garner this support. And just two days after his killing, his party finally gained this supermajority as a result of high-voter turnout for the LDP in the Upper House elections.
Hours after the results came in, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida—hitherto regarded as the leader of the LDP’s dovish, more moderate wing that has been historically wary of making changes to the status quo—signaled he would pursue constitutional revision. That he is now openly endorsing this is a testament to lasting pull Abe has on Japanese politics, even after his death. Indeed, Abe’s killing has refocused the world’s attention on this constitutional debate. Following the election blowout, the Washington Post’s editorial board called for the U.S. government to endorse Japan’s effort to legitimize its military (something Washington has long supported), correctly noting that since Japan already boasts a top-five military on the world stage (its navy is even more capable), constitutional revision was the rubber stamp it needed to play a lasting role in the U.S.-led international order.
The apple of Abe’s eye has gone mainstream.
But institutional and legal reforms weren’t the only measures he championed in his quest to return his country to a place of relevancy. If he wanted to be portrayed as a leader of a “first-rate” power, he had to act the part. To this aim, he became one of the most visible international statesmen, traveling to more than 80 countries during his tenure – even beating out former U.S. President Obama, another leader with a famously active itinerary, who only visited some 60 countries. He stepped up to the plate and corralled the leaders of eleven countries to put together a successor agreement to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a hard-fought multilateral free trade deal Trump pulled the U.S. out of on his first day in office. He became a focal point at prestigious multilateral summits, namely the Group of Seven (G7) and the Group of Twenty (G20). He chaired meetings on Africa’s development that were attended by dozens of heads of state from the continent. He successfully lobbied, at great personal effort, to secure Tokyo’s bid to host the 2020 Olympics. He became the keynote speaker at elite gatherings such as the World Economic Forum (Davos).
He boosted Japan’s international profile and favorability to a level yet unseen.
As Abe claimed early on in his second term to a room of U.S. foreign policy practitioners who were skeptical of his ability to deliver on this promise yet applauding hopefully, “Japan is back.”
And boy did he prove those skeptics wrong. He was a visionary that could also execute.
Doubling Down on the U.S.-Japan Alliance
Abe’s pursuit of a Japan that could stand on its two feet didn’t come at the expense of the U.S.-Japan Alliance. He knew that for a country that still had highly restrictive military authorities, the 55,000 U.S. troops stationed on bases throughout Japan—and the extended U.S. nuclear umbrella afforded under the alliance—provided a critical deterrent. Especially amidst the backdrop of a rapidly militarizing China and a belligerent North Korea.
But his affinity for the relationship with the U.S. was not based solely on a realpolitik calculus. Despite his reservations over portions of the post-war constitution that Washington wrote, he, like the vast majority of Japanese people, held Japan’s special relationship with the U.S. to a high regard.
As someone who witnessed the alliance in action firsthand, I can attest to the strength of this relationship. It’s a relationship not without its friction points; U.S. aircraft accidents, noise pollution, and G.I. off-base misadventures—and sometimes violent crimes—provide a steady dose of complaints that can’t be overlooked. But on the whole, there really is a deep and genuine friendship there.
And over the past decade in particular, as an illiberal hegemon rose to its west (i.e., China), Japan’s appreciation for its democratic system (Japan actually ranks higher than the U.S. in the notorious “democracy index”) and its chief democratic partner—the U.S.—had only grown deeper. President Obama’s affirmation in 2014 that the U.S. would come to Japan’s aid militarily if China made a go on the Senkaku Islands—disputed territory in the East China Sea administered by Japan but claimed by Beijing that I would better liken to a string of “amphibious rocks”—was a particular sigh of relief for Abe. Japan needed the U.S.
Abe knew that for a U.S. that was just starting to reacclimate itself to the Asia-Pacific region after some fifteen years of middle eastern wars—Obama’s infamous “pivot”—it was incumbent that he take the initiative to reaffirm the alliance and outline an updated vision for it moving forward. Tone mattered. In 2015, he became the first Japanese leader ever to address a joint session of Congress, during which he heralded the countries close ties and paid respect to the outsized role the U.S. played in Japan’s success. “Enemies that fought each other so fiercely have become friends bonded in spirit,” he said, adding, “it was Japan that received the biggest benefit from the very beginning by the post-war economic system that the U.S…fostered.” Later in his speech he presaged a more proactive regional role for his country, asserting “[Japan is] resolved to take yet more responsibility for the peace and stability in the world.” He received a standing ovation from both parties of Congress.
In 2016, he and Obama embarked on a moving whirlwind of summitry that saw Obama become the first U.S. president ever to visit Hiroshima—the site where the U.S. dropped one of two nuclear bombs—and Abe become the first Japanese leader ever to visit Pearl Harbor, the fateful location of the Japanese attack that brought the U.S. into WWII. It was the sort of feel-good diplomacy meant to clear the air once and for all and usher in a new chapter in the relationship.
By the time Former President Trump got into office in 2017, Abe’s defense agenda had coalesced behind a two-track strategy of bolstering JSDF capabilities and continuing to improve the U.S.-Japan Alliance. And this was a mutually fulfilling approach; by achieving the former, he could advance the latter.
In 2018, Japan announced its purchase of billions of dollars’ worth of U.S.-made defense equipment in an effort to fill two major capability gaps: missile and airspace defense. At the height of North Korean nuclear browbeating, Japan’s procurement of two Aegis Ashore batteries, an advanced ballistic missile defense system, was to serve as the peace of mind needed to guard against Japanese annihilation, however unlikely that scenario was. (Japan has since scrapped this procurement in favor of pursuing a capability to strike enemy targets on the Korean Peninsula and the Chinese Mainland—“the best defense is a good offense”—a constitutionally controversial initiative Abe was working to garner support for up until the moment of his death). Japan’s pledge to purchase some 150 F-35 fighter aircraft, the most advanced aircraft of its kind, would in part help Japan’s air force intercept the record numbers of Chinese aircraft penetrations into Japan’s airspace – maneuvers that have increased significantly in spate over the past 5 years.
The purchases earned Japan major brownie points with Trump, who often touted multibillion dollar arms sales as a means to restore balance into U.S. alliance relationships. Japan’s fielding the largest foreign contingent of F-35s—the U.S.’ most expensive piece of weaponry by leaps and bounds—was a cushy data point Abe could pull out of his back pocket anytime Trump expressed irritation with the alliance, which happened frequently enough to keep the Japanese on edge during his time in office.
Under Abe’s leadership, the number of joint military exercises the JSDF participated in with its U.S. counterparts increased exponentially. The exercises also improved in sophistication – a prerequisite the JSDF had to meet if it wanted to be able to combat the modern challenges posed by its adversaries.
But perhaps the most important contribution Abe provided to the alliance was not so much anything he did per se, but what he provided. And that was stability.
Before Abe, U.S. officials bemoaned what they referred to as the “revolving door” of Japanese prime ministers – the frequent turnover of leadership that made it all but impossible for Washington to advance bilateral initiatives with Japan, and vice versa (Japan had 4 prime ministers in less than 3 years early during Obama’s first term). Abe blunted this “symptom of…sclerotic, aimless politics,” as Obama described it, with his uninterrupted 8 year tenure – a period which will go down as the most productive for the alliance, especially with respect to its hyper-focus on addressing the threat posed by China.
Abe improved Japan’s wellbeing by advancing this pivotal alliance.
A Shrewd Statesman
Abe was a skilled pragmatist. He also had a firm grasp of the importance of personal touch in carrying out diplomacy and playing the game of geopolitics. He knew how to charm. He knew how to induce. But he also knew when and how to stand his ground with foreign leaders to defend core Japanese interests.
These qualities were omnipresent in his approach to Donald Trump, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. And his tactful and steady management of these relationships was critical to his advancement of Japan’s strategic interests.
Donald Trump
Trump, for better or worse, presented a challenge for Abe like no other. Abe, like many world leaders, had expected Hillary Clinton to soar to the presidency in 2016. When it was Trump—a candidate that had called into question the importance of the U.S.-Japan Alliance on the campaign trail—who won, Abe knew he would have to inject a level of personal diplomacy uncharacteristic to Japanese leaders in order to keep the relationship above water. Just one week after Trump had secured the presidency, Abe hastily arranged a meeting at Trump Tower in New York City –becoming the first world leader to meet with him following the win and breaking protocol for foreign interactions with a president-elect.
His visit was a positive first step in establishing what would become perhaps Trump’s closest personal bond with a foreign leader – a rapport that Abe would go on to foster in large part by stroking Trump’s ego with warm statements on his leadership prowess and by turning state visits into flashy ordeals centered around the American president (his having Trump hand deliver a 70 pound trophy to a similarly heavy sumo wrestler comes to mind).
But it wasn’t just personal politicking that kept the relationship afloat. Abe also made some considerable concessions to remain in Trumps good graces – namely his negotiating a 2019 trade deal with the U.S. that opened up Japan’s hallowed agricultural industry (a move that carried with it tremendous political risk for Abe) after Trump had raised some very real questions about imbalances in the bilateral trade relationship.
These active measures in part helped him avoid anything but passing ire from Trump with respect to Japan’s monetary contributions to U.S. forces stationed in Japan. (Trump’s demand that South Korea quintuple its subsidy for U.S. forces stationed on the Korean Peninsula—from 900 million dollars per year to 5 billion—nearly torched the U.S.’ alliance with that country. It was an existential sticking point only remedied by Trump losing the 2020 election.)
But it wasn’t all about taking it on the chin and limiting fallout. Abe’s conciliatory approach to Trump achieved the larger goal that underlined every interaction he had with Washington: keeping the U.S. engaged in the region.
Nothing highlighted the success of this aim more than the U.S.—with the ironclad support of Abe’s administration—identifying China as its preeminent threat for the first time in the Pentagon’s redrafted National Defense Strategy, released in 2018. The U.S. was finally getting tough on China. And for Abe, who had been a proponent of this long before it was fashionable, it was a huge geostrategic win.
Back in the comfort of his bully pulpit in the nearly 2 years since stepping down from the premiership, I can only imagine how tickled Abe was to see the Biden Administration, in a rare example of inter-party consensus, building off—rather than throwing out—the counter-China initiatives the Trump Administration had put in place. And while it wasn’t all his doing, he sure had a hand in jogging the U.S. bureaucracy to action on this. Or at the very least, hand-holding Trump long enough for it to happen.
Xi Jinping
Abe’s approach to Xi Jinping, the insular leader of the opaque Chinese government, was one of playing up mutual interests to ameliorate tensions. It reflected pragmatic calculations.
Sino-Japanese relations had nosedived to its lowest point since the two sides had normalized relations in 1985 by the time Abe started his second term in 2012. Months earlier, his predecessor had effectively nationalized the disputed Senkaku Islands by purchasing the islands from a private Japanese proprietor who had acquired them from the U.S. following the end of the its post-war control over the Ryukyus in 1972. Beijing, which claims the islets under the name “Diaoyu Islands,” responded by sending an armada of coast guard cutters on provocative patrols near the islands (a measure China continues up until this day). Anti-Japanese protests, stoked by government rhetoric bashing its neighbor, broke out in China’s major cities. Japanese auto dealerships throughout the country became targets of violent attacks.
Escalating the dispute to a fever pitch, the Chinese Government declared a unilateral Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) in the East China Sea in 2013—one that overlapped with Japan’s own ADIZ—a measure which required China’s air force patrol the skies over the Senkakus. Chinese and Japanese military aircraft came in close contact with one another on a routine basis, something that carried with it a great risk of causing an accident that could ignite a larger conflict.
For Abe, it was high time to ease tensions, even if behind the scenes he was doing more than any other Japanese leader had to sound the alarm on the threat posed by a rapidly militarizing China. He, like many great geostrategic practitioners, understood that it was important to walk and chew gum at the same time.
In 2013, Abe begun the multi-year process of doing just that. He blunted repeated calls by the Chinese that Japan recognize a sovereignty dispute over the Senkakus existed as a precondition to improved ties, correctly assessing that China depended on the massive two-way trade between their countries just as much as Japan did and would therefore be reluctant to escalate the “non-dispute” to a point that would jeopardize these interests.
After years of standing firm on the Senkakus while advocating for “forward-looking” relations centered around “mutually-beneficial” interests (e.g., commercial ties), Abe’s window of opportunity for détente came in early-2018 after Trump initiated a trade war with China. The Chinese were now in a place of rare vulnerability. So, he turned up the heat on the diplomatic overtures.
Xi, hoping to mitigate risk amidst a trade war of unknown scope and duration with the U.S. by shoring up China’s other major trade relationships, rewarded Abe’s efforts by inviting him to China for a state visit in October 2018. It was the first visit to China by a Japanese leader since 2011. There the two sides inked even more economic agreements (two-way trade between China, the world’s second-largest economy, and Japan, the third largest, topped at nearly 375 billion dollars in 2021) and agreed to establish a military hotline intended to help mitigate clashes over the Senkaku Islands. Xi was due to make a reciprocal visit to Japan in 2020, but the COVID pandemic, as well as Japanese citizens’ souring attitudes toward China following its consolidation of Hong Kong in 2019 and other bellicose behavior, prevented this visit happening.
And while the rapprochement Abe achieved resulted in only a brief cooling of tensions over the Senkakus (Chinese Coast Guard presence in the waters around the islands reached a record high in 2021), he was able to successfully insulate the economic segment of the Japan-China relationship from the security piece without having to breach his red-line on this issue (a recognition that a dispute even existed, that is). His mentee and current Japanese Prime Minister, Fumio Kishida, who has continued to approach Japan-China relations in the spirit of this formula, is a beneficiary of the template he so patiently erected.
Abe’s taking advantage of an external opportunity—Trump’s trade war with China—to advance his own country’s interest vis-à-vis China also showcased considerable strategic maturity and cunning.
A shrewd statesman indeed.
Narendra Modi
The genius of Abe’s approach to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is encapsulated by his achieving what no modern leader of any country could do: getting India to play a more active and prominent role in international relations. For decades, India was loath to get involved in the game of great power politics, a holdover of its strict non-alignment policy during the Cold War (it neither allying itself with the U.S., nor the Soviet Union). And then came Abe.
Abe, very early on in his first stint as prime minister, recognized the strategic benefit from an external balancing standpoint of having India—home to the world’s second largest population (behind China, at least for now; demographers estimate India’s population will eclipse China’s by 2050) and its most populous democracy—more squarely ensconced in the West’s orbit. India, believed by economists to be the next engine of global economic growth (“the next China”), shares a some 2,000-mile-long border with China, much of it contested. More importantly, it serves as the waystation between the oil-rich Middle East and the Strait of Malacca, the nearly 600 mile-long and, at its narrowest, 2 mile-wide choke point where 25% of the world’s traded good and some 70% and 90% of Chinese and Japanese annual oil imports pass through every year, respectively. These were facts that Abe, ever the strategic thinker, could not ignore. An India more involved in the pacific region could help form a bulwark against a rising China, in a way that Japan, the U.S., and other likeminded regional democracies such as Australia could only dream of forming on their own.
Hosting former Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in Japan in 2006 for a leader summit, Abe laid the groundwork for closer Japan-India ties by elevating the relationship to a "Global and Strategic Partnership,” which, among other things, institutionalized annual prime ministerial summits. During his reciprocal visit to India in 2007, Abe delivered his famous, and much-studied, “Confluence of the Two Seas” speech to India’s Parliament, in which he spoke of a “dynamic coupling” of the Pacific and Indian Oceans into a “broader Asia.” His speech, which also warmly invoked the memory of legendary Indian philosophers to the applaud of India’s political class, stated it was incumbent that Japan and India cooperate to ensure this developing mega-region remain “open and transparent” – a not-so-subtle barb to the threat a rising China presaged to the status quo. (This seminal speech was the earliest articulation of what, a decade later, would become Abe’s “Free and Open Indo-Pacific Vision.” It also served as the rally cry for the “Quad.” Your author will expound on these two things in just a moment).
Expanded bilateral economic agreements, new inflows of foreign direct investment into India from Japanese companies, and a groundswell of Japanese Government-funded infrastructure and development projects in India followed. India was starting to take the bait.
Abe continued to build on these efforts when he took back the premiership in 2012. In 2014, as the Indian premiership changed hands from Manmohan Singh to Narendra Modi, he dialed up his efforts to coax India into hyperdrive. He did so in large part through personal diplomacy; by forging what many Asia watchers (myself included) contend was a genuine friendship with Modi that ran so deep one could defensibly call it a “bromance.” A bromance full of “man-hugs” as The Economist points out.
But don’t take my word for it; take theirs. Modi—who had earlier declared a National Day of Mourning in India following Abe’s death, a rare honor for a foreign leader—called Abe a “dear friend,” in his penned tribute to the fallen statesman. Theirs was a “friendship [that] went beyond the trappings of office and the shackles of official protocol,” he said. “I will always be indebted for his warmth and wisdom, grace and generosity, friendship and guidance, and I will miss him dearly. We in India mourn his passing as one of our own, just as he embraced us with an open heart,” he concluded.
Abe, for his part, had warmly called Modi "one of [his] most dependable and valuable friends,” years earlier.
World leaders don’t typically talk about their foreign counterparts in these terms.
Abe’s personal courting of Modi produced swift results. By the end of 2014, he and Modi had upgraded the Japan-India relationship to a “Special and Strategic Partnership,” which effectively expanded their scope of cooperation beyond the economic sphere to encompass diplomatic and military collaboration. In 2016, the two leaders signed a landmark deal that allowed Japan to export civil nuclear technology and material to India, eliminating a politically contentious hurdle to improved ties (decades earlier, Japan had levied significant sanctions on India after it gained a nuclear-weapons capability).
In 2019, India and Japan held their inaugural “2+2” Foreign and Defense Ministerial talks, which were the first of their kind for India and paved the way for 2+2s between India and the U.S., then India and Australia. Months after violent skirmishes between Indian and Chinese troops had broken out on disputed sections of their shared border in 2020, Japan and India finalized an “Acquisition and Cross-Servicing Agreement,” a provision intended to boost interoperability between the Indian Military and the JSDF.
By the end of Abe’s life, India (like Japan) was referring to its region as the “Indo-Pacific,” releasing edgy statements that were critical of Beijing, and signing on to the sort of U.S.-led initiatives that western security practitioners never thought possible. It was Abe—as Malcolm Turnbull, Australia’s former prime minister, articulated—who “put in the hard yards” with India.
He had lured the subcontinent out of its hideout.
A Master Strategist
On-brand with his effort to portray Japan as a first-rate power internationally, Abe also thought like the leader of a first-rate power.
Abe’s coinage and popularization of the phrase “free and open Indo-Pacific” will go down as perhaps the most visible and enduring exhibition of his strategic ingenuity. The phrase has since morphed into a catch-all I would better translate to “maintenance of the status quo” that officials from Western-affiliated countries dish out repetitively like gospel hymn. It’s really a blanketed refutation of China and the threat it poses to the regional status quo. And it’s a phrase that pervades the screens of teleprompters around the world.
But Abe is the real mastermind behind this mantra. And at least for Japan, the mantra is accompanied by a whole-of-government strategy. First articulated in a 2016 speech, though many scholars trace its roots to the 2007 “Confluence of the Two Seas” speech, Abe’s Free and Open Indo-Pacific Vision rested on three major pillars (this will get a little abstract for the uninitiated; bear with me):
A strategic conception of the Pacific and Indian Ocean regions as one mega-region via which Japan would party influence through by enhancing economic, diplomatic, and security ties with countries in this “Indo-Pacific” region.
A sustainment—and promotion—of the principles of the liberal international order (“small-l” liberalism) that by and large have delineated how countries interact with one another since the end of WWII. (Such principles include freedom of navigation in the seas, free trade, and the use of international mechanisms to mediate and resolve disputes).
A promotion—and furnishing of—Japanese-developed infrastructure projects to countries throughout the Indo-Pacific (of which some projects would be financed outright through Japanese Government grants and others via low-interest loans Japan extends host countries).
The strategy is a reaction to two major developments: (1) China’s construction and militarization of artificial islands in the South China Sea – a blatant violation international law and norms, and (2) China’s “Belt and Road Initiative,” a massive 1 trillion dollar international infrastructure development program that, by 2016, outside researchers believed Beijing was parlaying in part as a front to establish military bases throughout the Pacific and Indian Ocean regions (check out this video if you want to learn more).
Abe’s entrepreneurship in crafting this strategy was also prompted by a perception that the U.S.—led by Barack Obama, a “lame duck” president with one foot out the door by this point—had not adequately responded to these two developments.
Worse yet, with Donald Trump—a figure who had chastised U.S. commitments abroad—winning the Republic ticket for the 2016 presidential election, there were real fear at the time of a wholesale U.S. retreat from the region if he won. Someone needed to be the adult in the room to defend the status quo. If no one stepped up to push back on China’s largesse, Beijing would have the freedom to rewrite the rules in a way that disproportionately benefited its own interests. Or so, that was the thinking.
That “someone” to take up the mantle and “adult” was Abe. As he said in his 2016 speech, “Japan bears the responsibility of fostering the confluence of the Pacific and Indian Oceans…into a place that values freedom, the rule of law, and the market economy, free from force or coercion.”
For Japan, open sea lanes and free markets were fundamental to its economy and security. These “rules-based norms” had provided a degree of predictability that helped Japan maneuver in the international system relatively painlessly to advance its interests in the some seventy years since the end of WWII. China’s assertiveness had thrown a wrench into that predictability.
Luckily for Abe, Trump’s ascendency to the presidency did not herald the sort of isolationist America many feared. Rather, he came to espouse a hawkishness toward China that was similar to Abe’s own threat perception of its rising neighbor. Instead of retreating, the Trump Administration retooled itself to counter China’s growing influence. Coincidentally, it had a ready-made template for how to do this – one conceived by its Japanese ally.
During a speech he delivered at the November 2017 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Vietnam, Trump referred to the region as the Indo-Pacific instead of Asia-Pacific, the U.S. nomenclature of choice for decades. It was the first public use of this name by a high-level U.S. official, no less by the president of the United States.
The Trump Administration’s National Security Strategy, produced in December 2017, codifies a U.S. interest in a “free and open Indo-Pacific.” It sounds the alarm on China’s ulterior motives vis-à-vis foreign infrastructure projects, while promising the U.S. would “encourage regional cooperation to maintain free and open seaways, transparent infrastructure financing practices, unimpeded commerce, and the peaceful resolution of disputes.” In a nod to Abe’s foresight in crafting the first allied strategy to buttress the status quo and compete with China, it “welcome[s] and support[s] the strong leadership role of our critical ally, Japan.”
In May 2018, U.S. Pacific Command (PACOM), the unified combatant command with an area of responsibility that stretches from the west coast of the U.S. all the way to the India-Pakistan border, changed its name to Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM). Former Defense Secretary Mattis said the name change was a recognition of the “increasing connectivity between the Indian and Pacific oceans.” The outgoing commander of PACOM, Admiral Harris, framed the rebrand in starker terms. “I believe we are reaching an inflection point in history… A geopolitical competition between free and oppressive visions is taking place in the Indo-Pacific,” he said.
In 2019, the Trump Administration unveiled its official Indo-Pacific Strategy, which catalyzed America’s own whole-of-government approach to the region, including the furnishing of hundreds of millions of dollars of grant money for infrastructure projects throughout the region. The U.S. was finally putting money where its mouth was to compete with China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
Australia followed this up by doubling down on its own initiatives in the Indo-Pacific, first articulated in its 2017 Foreign Policy White Paper. Then followed India’s Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative. Then France’s Indo-Pacific Strategy. Then the Association of Southeast Asian Nation’s (ASEAN; the multilateral grouping of Southeast Asian countries that make up the main “battleground” of Western competition with China) Outlook on the Indo-Pacific. Then the European Union’s Strategy for Cooperation in the Indo-Pacific. Then Germany’s Policy guidelines for the Indo-Pacific region. Then the United Kingdom’s declared ‘tilt’ to the Indo-Pacific. Then Canada’s creation of an Indo-Pacific Advisory Committee. And so on and so forth. You get the idea…
Even NATO, a Europe-centric alliance whose primary purpose is to defend members from Russia, is now considering devoting attention to the Indo-Pacific. Earlier this month, leaders from Japan, Australia, South Korea and New Zealand attended the NATO Summit in Madrid – the first time there had ever been representation from Indo-Pacific countries at such a meeting. NATO’s Strategic Concept, adopted by member nations during the meeting, mentions the threat China poses to the status quo – another first.
Abe was the brainchild that set all this in motion. He stepped up to the plate and filled a major leadership vacuum left by a U.S. in transition struggling to conceptualize its role in managing China’s rise. He put in the mental pushups and outlined a convincing framework that capitals throughout the Indo-Pacific and Europe have by and large replicated. As Richard Armitage and Joseph Nye, giants in the American foreign policy establishment, declared in 2020: “For the first time in its history, Japan is taking an equal, if not leading, role in the alliance.”
And after figuring out that it was Abe and not his archrival Trump who had coined the phrase “free and open Indo-Pacific,” Biden has continued to foster and build on that vision. In February he released his administration’s own Indo-Pacific Strategy, which will guide America’s approach to the region for at least the next couple of years.
Coming on the scene to INDOPACOM months after the rebrand, I witnessed a military bureaucracy that was struggling to embrace its new name. By the time I left three years later, “ensuring a Free and Open Indo-Pacific” was affixed to virtually every press statement the command released and readily recitable by every servicemember or civil servant in the organization, no matter their rank. It was the mission statement that drove everything we did.
We had Abe to thank for that.
Quad
The other commanding example of Abe’s strategic genius and hardheaded foresight was his conceptualization—and steadfast stewardship of—the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or the “Quad” as the enlightened like to call it. Initially conceived during Abe’s first stint as prime minister in 2007, the Quad is a loose—yet ever tightening—geostrategic grouping of Japan, the U.S., Australia, and India. Still leaps and bounds from anything resembling a former alliance (claims that the bloc amounts to an “Asian NATO” are overblown), the Quad has nevertheless morphed into a regional bulwark against China and the threat it poses to the status quo. Indeed, it’s a centerpiece in all four countries’ free and open Indo-Pacific concepts.
But the Quad of today is not the Quad a young Abe had managed to cajole together in 2007. In fact, it was basically dead on arrival, only lasting one meeting before Australia, India, and even the U.S. thought better of it. Months after their first meeting, Abe—the Quad’s primary advocate—resigned from office, citing health concerns. Kevin Rudd, Australia’s former prime minister, then unilaterally withdrew from the initiative after receiving diplomatic blowback from China, the Aussies largest trading partner. India, for its part, was happy to see the grouping dissolve. It too was on the receiving end of some nastygrams from Beijing and had worried it may have gotten out in front of its skis in repudiating its historic allergy to playing geopolitics.
Washington was largely apathetic to the bloc’s dissolution. Its focus remained on fighting two botched wars in the Middle East, not to mention trying to tame a historic financial crisis that had coincided with a presidential election cycle. It—though to a far lesser extent—also had some sensitives around upsetting Beijing. It’s hard to remember a time when the two sides weren’t at loggerheads, but in 2008 the U.S. still held out hope that it could shape China into a “responsible stakeholder,” in large part by enmeshing their giant economies together. Washington was still inclined to give Beijing the benefit of the doubt. Why needlessly stir up the Chinese dragon? Or so, that was the thinking.
So, the Quad went into hiding, tucked away in a filing cabinet of obscurity for nearly a decade. But all the while, Abe had kept the dream alive.
By 2017 it was clear that China, under the leadership of Xi Jinping, had taken on a far more muscular foreign policy. This was something that all four democracies had independently expressed alarm over. Another notable development had occurred around this time: the election of Donald Trump, a figure who had scorned the U.S.’ role as the “world’s policeman,” but had nonetheless expressed a hawkishness toward this version of China.
Abe, ever the leader to identify—and act on—an opportunity, pounced. He put his diplomats to task. Their mission: gauge American, Australian, and Indian receptivity toward reviving the Quad. A resuscitated Quad could help serve a two-fold, and indeed mutually beneficial, strategic aim: creating a necessary counterbalance to China and keeping the U.S. engaged in the region.
America was all in. Australia also took the bait. India, initially quite hesitant, eventually signed on (Abe’s close relationship with Prime Minister Modi no doubt contributed to its acquiescence). Ties between the countries improved in earnest. They held a total of five meetings from 2017 to 2019, some at the working-level, others featuring their respective foreign ministers (Secretary of State for the U.S.). The agenda items in these meetings tracked closely with the tenants found in their respective Indo-Pacific concepts. One area of focus that seemed to dominate every meeting was Southeast Asia. Specifically, the groups’ coordination to ensure they provided Southeast Asian countries viable alternatives to Chinese Belt and Road Initiative-funded infrastructure projects, deals that often left participants in subjugated positions as a result the predatory lending practices extent in many of these contracts. By now the West has a flashy term for this practice: “Debt-trap diplomacy.” It’s economic coercion, really, that can be leveraged for other goodies – military bases, deep-water ports, satellite-tracking sites and the such.
This is an area where Japan was a “force multiplier.” It had far more success than the U.S., Australia, and India in notching infrastructure deals with Southeast Asian countries. It did better than the U.S., and to a great extent China too, because it was a reliable financier that represented the best “third option” to countries in Southeast Asia that were wary of becoming a pawn in the U.S.-China competition. It did better than Australia and India because it had deeper commercial ties to the region, more capital at its disposal, and frankly a better development reputation and name association (think Japanese bullet trains). In fact, India itself was a major beneficiary of Japanese infrastructure projects.
Beijing remained uniquely spooked by how quickly the Quad had coalesced into a substantive entity, issuing regular public threats—and I must assume private warnings in the form of diplomatic démarches—on the negative impact to the countries’ respective bilateral ties with China if they did not disengage. However, this time around, Australia and India kept their eye in the prize and did not buckle to the Chinese threats. They could also deniably retort that the Quad was not an anti-China bloc because the readouts from the meetings never directly mentioned China.
Their resolve (and indeed the U.S. and Japan’s) only hardened in 2020, the pivotal year when, in my opinion, China miscalculated royally by opening up fresh disputes with multiple countries on multiple fronts. In May 2020, Beijing imposed crippling tariffs on Australian barley imports after former Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison had called for an independent investigation into the origins of COVID. One month later, Chinese People’s Liberation Army soldiers engaged in a series of border clashes with the Indian military which resulted in the deaths of twenty Indian servicemen (they were literally bludgeoned to death with fists, clubs, and stones – “weapons” of choice used by both nuclear powers in order to limit military escalation). Elsewhere on its periphery China had also exerted unprecedented pressure. It staged a record number of incursions into the territorial waters surrounding Japan’s Senkaku Islands. It stepped up its harassment of Malaysian and Vietnamese oil rigs in the South China Sea that were rightfully operating within their internationally-recognized territorial waters. And, most notably, it began a sustained campaign of aggressive fighter jet—and on occasion, nuclear-capable bomber—sorties into Taiwan’s airspace.
This antagonism did not achieve its objective of getting its neighbors to fall in line and quit being critical of the Chinese Communist Party. Rather, it only hardened their resolve. Australia’s transformation as a result of this bellicosity is particularly striking. Basically overnight, Australia threw water on its’ decades long strategy of balancing its massive trade relationship with China (at one point, Australia exported over one-third of its goods to China) and its defense alliance with the U.S in favor of one far more aligned with the U.S and its quest to compete with China. In late-2021, Australia signed on to a historic trilateral strategic partnership with the U.S. and the U.K. (dubbed “AUKUS”) intended to help it develop its first fleet of nuclear-powered submarines – perhaps the most advanced, and potent, power-projection capability under the sun. It’s a dramatic example of Australia’s quantum shift in perception toward China.
But Australia’s evolution is case study—rather than an outlier—of an overall souring in regional views toward China. Ironically, the end result of China’s coercive efforts to divide democratic nations in its periphery achieved exactly what it was worried about: a Quad more aligned than ever in its animus toward it.
In 2020, Australia participated for the first time in Exercise Malabar, an annual military drill held between the U.S., Indian, and Japanese navies. The Aussies’ participation made it a de facto Quad exercise, thereby filling a gaping hole in the countries’ collaboration up until that point: four-way military cooperation. That same year, Quad members invited representatives from South Korea, Indonesia, and New Zealand to attend a subsequent working-level meeting as “observer” countries – a move that signaled the bloc may be open to including more permanent members down the road.
In 2021, the four countries agreed to elevate the Quad from a “foreign ministerial” to a “leadership summit”– an upgrade that reflected the growing centrality of this geopolitical grouping to the foreign policy of all four nations. This was a watershed development. Getting the leaders of four countries into the same room for anything is a big deal (or a “Big F—ing Deal” as Biden would term it). Getting the leaders of four countries into the same room for an initiative that just years earlier had been collecting dust in a rickety filing cabinet in Tokyo is an even bigger deal (a “Bigger F—ing Deal”).
At their most recent summit meeting in May of this year (their fourth such summit), the leaders signed on to a new maritime domain awareness agreement, whereby their countries will cooperate to share real-time intelligence on suspicious ship movements amongst themselves and with other likeminded nations throughout the region. The deal is likely aimed at buttressing friendly South China Sea claimant nations Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam who frequently have to contend with Chinese-backed fishing armadas—and sometimes Chinese Coast Guard cutters themselves—lurking in their territorial waters. It’s arguably the most substantive deliverable yet to come out of a Quad meeting. But I’d venture to guess this is only the beginning of what could very well turn into something resembling a military pact way down the line. The ball of course is in China’s court.
What is certain, however, is that Chinese Foreign Minister Wang’s 2018 prediction that “like the sea foam in the Pacific or Indian Ocean,” the Quad “may get some attention, but soon will dissipate," was incorrect (though I have to say your analogy was lovely, Foreign Minister Wang). The Quad has turned into a viable multilateral mechanism to rebuff Chinese misconduct. And it’s here to stay for the foreseeable future.
Through all the Quad’s fits and starts, Abe stayed the course, patiently keeping his eye on the goal. He had the clairvoyance to recognize the potential—and value proposition— of the initiative a decade before anyone else. He had the perseverance required to ultimately see it through.
Yet another feather in his cap.
A Mixed Bag
Abe, like any great leader, was not without his controversies, follies, or blind spots. The most recycled critique detractors levy on him is that he was an ultra-nationalist bent on whitewashing Japan’s history. Some take convenient, ill-supported, mental jumps and claim he flirted with authoritarianism – the “Trump before Trump,” as one prominent pundit put it. Others liken him to an illiberal extremist.
Much of this is the work of hyperbole and reductivism. As with most things in life, the real picture is quite nuanced. So, let’s unpack it.
Yes, he was an unabashed political conservative back home. No, that does not automatically make him a fascist. Yes, early on in his career when he was a young political buck trying to make a name for himself he backed efforts to undermine left-wing teachers unions that he believed taught “masochistic” versions of Japanese history. Yes, his efforts to inject more patriotism and less shame into history textbooks bordered on revisionism in some cases, leading to reasonable suspicions that he approved of Japan’s conduct in WWII. Yes, he seemed to clean up his act by his second term, delivering moving speeches eulogizing allied losses from the war and expressing regret for Japanese atrocities that convincingly dispelled these notions.
No, he was not illiberal. He had great reverence for Japan’s democratic system and institutions. He maneuvered tactfully within the bounds of that system, consolidating enough influence that allowed him to pass landmark legislation, even if such bills were sometimes unpopular with his citizenry. He acknowledged when his health impaired his ability to serve his people, gracefully resigning on both occasions this occurred and peacefully transferring power to democratically elected successors.
Let’s not forgot too that his foreign policy rested on a maintenance of the liberal international order and its democratic norms. His Free and Open Indo-Pacific Vision so reflected the values and principles of free societies that the world’s strongest democracies basically plagiarized his strategy as their own. That’s quite a “small-l” liberal record.
Yes, in his quest to bring about a more prominent and respectable role for his country on the world stage he sometimes needlessly provoked international controversies that undercut this very goal. His 2013 visit to the divisive Yasukuni Shrine, which eulogizes Japan’s war dead, including some convicted war criminals, was particularly unhelpful. It infuriated China and South Korea, subjects of imperial abuse during WWII, creating even more tension on Japan’s periphery.
His reaction to a 2018 South Korean court ruling that found that Japanese companies who had subjugated Koreans into forced labor during the war remained liable for damages was asymmetric and escalatory (he initiated a trade war with South Korea). It undermined his hard fought 2015 Comfort Women Agreement with South Korea which provided financial retribution to victims of sexual assault at the hands of the Japanese Imperial Army during the war, resolving this historical stain “finally and irreversibly.” Yes, South Korea is not without fault in this situation too; former South Korean President Moon Jae-in benefited politically by reopening old wounds. But Abe’s lack of restraint in managing his junior partner fed into perceptions that he was unrepentant for Japan’s past, and it severely hampered U.S.-Japan-South Korea trilateral cooperation at the height of North Korean missile tests.
For all his foreign policy successes, Abe also stubbornly pursued some dead-end initiatives. He expended a tremendous amount of political capital and bandwidth trying to negotiate back a string of islands the Soviet Union had conquered in the final days of WWII (Russia’s Kuril Islands, known as the “Northern Territories” in Japan). In 2013 he revealed that his father’s last dying wish was to see Japan and Russia reach a settlement on this issue. Abe went on to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin 27 times over the next seven years—the most meetings he held with any foreign counterpart—even when it was clear to apparently everyone but him that Putin wasn’t negotiating in good faith. Worried about torpedoing these efforts, he refused to impose any sanctions with real teeth following Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine (that one didn’t age well). His response to Putin’s attempted poisoning of nationals in the U.K. with internationally-banned chemical weapons was similarly lifeless. These bankrupt reactions made Japan stick out among the world’s largest democracies, who had all signaled deep resolve against Putin’s aggression. Familial pressures and expectations sure can cause one to act unreasonably.
Abe’s single-minded pursuit of negotiating back the return of some twenty Japanese citizens that North Korean operatives abducted in the late 1970s so too took up much of his diplomatic bandwidth, even though it was abundantly clear that North Korean leader Kim Jung-un had no interest in addressing this topic, no less talking to Japan at all. Yet, Abe kept at it. For him, this was not just a legacy-defining issue, but a personal one. Abe cultivated close ties with the family members of the abductees way back in his days as a young lawmaker in the early 1990s. He took up their cause. He continued his advocacy into the premiership, often having U.S. presidents meet with the abductees’ families during their state visits in Tokyo. While his efforts bore little fruit, his ironclad loyalty to the victims and their memories is commendable. At the time of his assassination, he was dawning a blue pin signifying his solidarity with these families on the lapel of his suit jacket.
Finally, Abe left a mixed legacy when it came to economic policy. Yes, “Abenomics” woke the Japanese economy up after basically two decades of stagnation. Yes, his follow-on initiative, creativity dubbed (drumroll please) “Womenomics” brought a record number of Japanese women into the workforce – stimulating new growth and improving gender equality in a culture with the sort of traditional gender norms of 1950s America. No, these measures weren’t enough to adequately arrest Japan’s rapidly shrinking workforce. They were band aids.
Demographics—birth rates, gender distributions, age distributions—might be the most overlooked and underappreciated determinate of a nation’s security and prosperity. While many developed countries are in for a world of hurt in the coming decades as disproportionately large populations of forty and fifty-somethings enter retirement age and years of record low birth rates prevent employers from replenishing their workforces, the situation is no more dire than in Japan. Nearly 30% of Japan’s current population is over the age of 65, a percentage that will only increase over the next couple of decades. Birth rates remain well below the average needed to maintain its existing population (One study assessed Japan’s population will more than halve by the end of this century). For any country boasting such an overweighted elderly population, the strains to the welfare state (pensions, health care, etc.) would be acute. For Japan, a country that also boasts the highest average life expectancy in the world at 84 years, it amounts to a ticking time bomb of economic calamity.
To Abe’s credit, he passed historic immigration reform in 2019 as one of his last decisive acts as prime minister. The bill is intended to combat Japan’s labor shortage by freeing up visas for some 350,000 foreign workers to immigrate to the country through 2024. Yes, it was a politically ballsy move—and a step in the right direction—for the leader of a country that prides itself on its ethnic homogeneity to make (Japanese aversion to immigration runs deep). But with Japan experiencing 400,000 more deaths than births each year, its nowhere near enough.
Bad demographics put everything into perspective.
Unless Abe’s successors can somehow find a way to incentive women to have more (far more) children or to massively increase immigrant inflows or, by some miracle, to exponentially increase worker productivity (sentient AI anyone?), it seems all but inevitable that Japan will lose its cherished spot as the world’s third largest economy. It’s anyone’s guess how far down the totem pole it will fall.
But then again, what do I know about economics (basically nothing)? Nothing in this life is pre-ordained.
It will be interesting to see whether this issue so too knocks Japan back down to “second-rate” power status or whether a new generation of Japanese leaders, inspired by Abe’s ingenuity and proclivity for bold action, has what it takes to manage the headwinds and secure its “first-rate” future. Only time will tell.
What’s it all worth, anyway?
As the eulogies and anecdotes of government officials who interacted with Abe in some fashion have flooded the airwaves of cable news outlets and the opinion columns of newspapers in the weeks since his killing, I’ve been struck by a common theme echoed throughout their accounts.
They speak of a certain affability about Abe the man, that is. He had a warmth about him. He took a personal interest in whoever he was talking to. He sought common ground with even the most unassailable of foes. Humor always accompanied his politeness. He moved with a sort of effortless grace no matter the setting, be it through the cramped corridors of the National Diet or the lavish hallways of heads of state residences around the world.
One aid shared that he often thought that if he ever died, Abe would be the one to drop everything to console his wife. Another long-time confidant professed that in the some twenty years she had known him, she never witnessed him raise his voice or lose his temper. For the leader of a country with a deep-seated culture of hierarchy and undying loyalty to the “boss” (the so-called Japanese “salaryman”), these accounts struck me as highly irregular and deeply moving. He was a singularly kind leader.
And then I remembered a certain Hawaiian Government official sharing a story with me of an interaction his own boss had with Abe some years ago. While remarking on the strong Japanese affinity for Hawaiian culture, Abe shared that as a young boy growing up in Tokyo he had always assumed that pineapples grew on trees in the same sort of donut shape he enjoyed them right out of the Dole can. And then his family took a vacation to the islands those very pineapples came from.
Passing by the many pineapple fields of central Oahu on the road to the North Shore one morning, the sharp crowns of the fruit sticking out of the dirt like the anti-landing craft spikes militaries fortify their beachheads with, he couldn’t believe his eyes.
“How could something with such a prickly outside taste so sweet?”
I’d venture to guess that to the people that really mattered in his life—his friends and family—Abe will be remembered most for his warmth of character. To them, the achievements he wrought for his beloved country—of which there are many—are just bonuses to his legacy.
They are but fruits of his individuality.
May you rest in peace, Abe-san.