Tobias Harris

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The Postwar Japan That Shinzo Abe Built

In January 2007, only a few months after he was elected, at 52, as Japan’s youngest prime minister of the postwar era, Shinzo Abe delivered a speech outlining his policy priorities after the opening ceremony of the 166th session of Japan’s Diet, the country’s parliamentary body.

Most of the speech was a mundane laundry list of proposals, but one line proved especially revealing about the character of the man. “My mission is none other than to draw a new vision of a nation that can withstand the raging waves for the next 50 to 100 years”, Mr. Abe said.

I have regularly returned to this line — over the course of my writing about the former prime minister and as I reflected on his assassination on Friday — because it provided insight into what animated Mr.…  Seguir leyendo »

Unceremoniously forced to resign as Japan’s prime minister in 2007 after only a year in office, Shinzo Abe spent five years in the political wilderness. Few expected that he would return to lead the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), one of Japan’s two major political parties, let alone the country. But in September 2012, the party reinstated him as its leader, and three months later, so did Japan’s voters. “Japan is back,” Abe declared in a February speech in Washington; he could have been talking about himself as well.

His government enjoys public approval numbers as high as 72 percent, a level not seen this far into a Japanese prime minister’s term for more than a decade.…  Seguir leyendo »