Former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe has died at the age of 67 after being shot by an attacker. A look back at the legacy of Japan’s longest serving democratic leader.
Last update 8 July 2022
Shinzo Abe was shot at 11:30 and died in hospital from his wounds at the age of 67, an announcement made official around 17:50 on Friday 8th July. Former prime minister Abe was shot on the streets of Nara, a city in south-central Japan, by a 41-year-old man identified as Tetsuya Yamagami. Two shots were heard, and at least one hit Abe’s chest while he was giving a speech for a candidate in the July 10th Upper House elections from his own Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). The suspect, reported to be a former member of the Maritime Self-Defence Force (Japan’s equivalent of the navy), was immediately stopped and arrested, with Japanese broadcaster NHK citing police reports that he used a handmade gun to attack the ex-premier.
Abe, who lay on the floor unconscious, was taken by helicopter to a Nara hospital in a state of cardiopulmonary arrest, a term “often used in Japan before death is officially confirmed,” tweeted Michelle Ye Hee Lee from the Washington Post. Abe suffered an injury to the right side of his neck and internal bleeding in his chest which ultimately led to his death.
High quality footage of the ex PM of Japan, Shinzo Abe being shot at from behind with an improvised double barreled shotgun .pic.twitter.com/5XFbUAjNUj
— Dr Moriarty (@aarjunx) July 8, 2022
The reaction throughout Japan has been of shock, given Abe’s popularity and just how rare such attacks, and gun violence in general, are in the country—where a mere six gun deaths were reported in 2014, according to the National Police Agency. The attack was “a bolt from the blue,” tweeted Japan observer Tobias Harris, author of Abe biography The Iconoclast.
Japan’s gun laws are some of the most restrictive in the world. Possession of firearms is reserved only for hunting and sport, and even in such cases, tests, psychological assessments, and strict background checks must be passed to obtain a gun licence. Political violence is also virtually unheard of, at least since the more turbulent 1960s, when the leader of the Japan Socialist Party, Inejiro Asanuma, was stabbed to death by an ultranationalist.
Japan’s former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe shot while campaigning for a parliamentary election https://t.co/SFdPpd4KS7 pic.twitter.com/1mzdZGWAVQ
— Reuters (@Reuters) July 8, 2022
In the afternoon, as Abe was fighting for his life, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, also a member of the LDP, made an emotional speech in which he confirmed the gravity of Abe’s condition and condemned the attack. “This is a despicable and barbaric act that occurred in the midst of an election which is the foundation of democracy and absolutely cannot be tolerated. We condemn it in the harshest possible terms”. The exact motives behind the attack are still uncertain. As this story unfolds, we take a look at the life and legacy of Shinzo Abe.
Video of Prime Minister Kishida addressing the media and getting emotional as he described what happened: https://t.co/h1ENiBoJoe
— Jeffrey J. Hall 🇯🇵🇺🇸 (@mrjeffu) July 8, 2022
“It’s gut wrenching to have to leave my job before accomplishing my goals”. With heavy words and teary eyes Shinzo Abe unexpectedly announced his resignation after seven years and eight months as the prime minister of Japan, the world’s third largest economy, on the 28th of August 2020. He attributed the decision to his worsening health: for years he has suffered from ulcerative colitis, a chronic disease that forced him to resign from his first term as prime minister in 2007 only a year after taking office.
What will Abe the prime minister be remembered for, apart from being Japan’s longest serving prime minister? Perhaps the one thing that can be agreed on is that his legacy can’t be summed up by a single policy or defining moment. His leadership was marked by a number of reform strategies, (partial) successes and missed opportunities.
To understand who Shinzo Abe is and what he represents for Japan, we have to look back. As the member of a political dynasty, several of his ancestors held important posts. Nobusuke Kishi, his grandfather on his mother’s side, was prime minister between 1957 and 1960, and great-uncle Eisaku Sato, who led the government between 1964 and 1972, was the country’s longest serving premier before his great-nephew. Also, father Shintaro Abe was foreign minister from 1982 to 1986.
After completing his education in Tokyo (where he was born in 1954) and the United States, Shinzo Abe worked for a steel manufacturer before undertaking his political career in the LDP, a conservative party that has been in power almost without interruption since the end of the Second World War. Notwithstanding his elite background, “from the moment he entered the Diet (the Japanese parliament, ed.) in 1993, he’s someone who looked at the powers that be, what you would call the post-war establishment, and saw them as having failed in the fundamental job of building a strong state and independent Japan,” says Tobias Harris, author of The Iconoclast, an Abe biography that was published the day before the prime minister announced his resignation.
In fact, Abe’s political rise came on the back of his engagement with matters of national pride, such as the issue of Japanese citizens abducted by the North Korean regime in the 1960s. A matter that remains unsolved to this day; even as prime minister, Abe didn’t succeed in repatriating dozens if not hundreds of abductees.
Following popular leader Junichiro Koizumi‘s resignation in 2006, Abe became Japan’s first post-war premier born after the end of the conflict. Notwithstanding his resignation after a one-year term marred by corruption scandals, Abe returned at the government’s helm with two crushing electoral victories in 2012 and 2016. In 2012 he inaugurated his mandate with a visit to Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine, a memorial to the fallen soldiers of World War II, including a number of war criminals. A gesture that signalled Abe’s desire to reassert Japan’s status as a global power and his penchant for historical revisionism.
Giving Japan a new and important international role was perhaps one of Abe’s greatest successes. But he left the premiership with his lowest-ever approval ratings, in the midst of a complicated domestic political scenario due, in part, to the emergence of the coronavirus. Even though Japan has managed to keep its infection rates low relative to other industrialised nations, the government’s slow response to the crisis has left many citizens disappointed.
However, the cracks had already started to form prior to the pandemic. Corruption scandals, some involving the prime minister directly – such as the misuse of tax-payer money to organise annual hanami parties – and the shortcomings of his signature economic reform package, Abenomics, has already been eroding Abe’s popularity.
I’ll break down any and all walls looming ahead of the Japanese economy and map out a new trajectory for growth. This is precisely the mission of Abenomics.
With the leader’s resignation, political commentators’ varied and often contrasting judgements of Abe’s legacy go to show how Abenomics has had mixed results, meaning that anyone can point to evidence to support almost any position.
“The outgoing prime minister has done a far better job than is commonly acknowledged,” writes The Economist. “Before Covid-19 struck, ‘Abenomics’ was succeeding, albeit slowly, in resuscitating the economy. He leaves a much more impressive legacy than his muted exit suggests”.
Abe’s promise to lift Japan from decades of deflation (a general fall in prices) resulted in higher profits for large companies and higher share prices as a result of a monetary stimulus programme. “However, the two per cent annual inflation target set by the central bank and the government to bust deflation remains nowhere in sight more than seven years on,” states a Japan Times editorial.
“One thing about his legacy is recognising that he oversaw the second-longest stretch of growth in the post-war era,” Harris points out. “Yes, it was short-lived; it halted in the face of the consumption tax last year (which was increased from 8 to 10 per cent, ed.) and Japan finds itself in a recession due to the pandemic. But employment numbers matter too: having the lowest unemployment rate and the highest job to applicant ratio ever, giving school-leavers an embarrassment of riches when it comes to finding a job,” Harris continues.
They want women to shine for them, not for women themselves. It’s never about empowerment.
The impact of Abe’s policies is particularly debated when it comes to women. With the womenomics programme he aimed to build “a Japan in which women can shine” by incentivising their economic role, both as members of the workforce and mothers. Waiting lists for kindergartens were reduced, though not eliminated, parental leave policies were improved and a law was introduced obliging companies to set female employment targets.
These reforms allowed two million extra women to enter the job market, with an employment rate of over 77 per cent – higher than that of other industrialised countries such as the United States, where a little over half of women work.
But in Japan, half of female employment is concentrated in non-regular jobs, which are low-paid, part-time and temporary. A little over a tenth of managerial positions are occupied by women, well below the government’s 30 per cent target, and Japan lost eleven positions in this year’s Global Gender Gap Report by the World Economic Forum (WEF), ranking 121st out of 153 countries.
An embarrassing result for the man behind womenomics, whose cabinet was composed of 19 men and a single woman. With only 10 per cent of female members of parliament, Japan has one of the worst rates of female political representation in the world. “Japan’s gender gap is by far the largest among all advanced economies and has widened over the past year,” according to the WEF report. With these preconditions, the coronavirus has further exposed the vulnerabilities of female employment: of the 970,000 non-regular workers who lost their jobs last April, over 700,000 were women.
Abe, therefore, didn’t succeed in significantly improving women’s position in Japanese society. He was, however, more effective in the realm of international relations. “He made Japan visible in ways in which it hadn’t been in a long time, converting his political stability at home into regional and global leadership,” Harris comments. “The numbers bear it out, he was present in ways in which a Japanese prime minister hasn’t been pretty much ever: 81 foreign trips in total, 100 or something countries visited”.
The outgoing premier was adept at keeping good relations with President Donald Trump, particularly important given that Japan’s defensive capabilities depend on security arrangements with the United States (which are in the process of being renegotiated). He also strengthened relations with countries such as Australia and India, though failed to secure an agreement with Russia over the disputed Kuril Islands, which are under Moscow’s administration but some of which Tokyo claims as its own.
Another sour note is the deterioration of relations with South Korea. Abe initiated a trade war against his neighbour because its supreme court ruled that Japanese companies should pay reparations to people used as slave labour during the Japanese occupation of Korea in World War II. If we also factor in the former leader’s visit to Yasukuni Shrine and his threat to retract his country’s official apology to Korean comfort women, enslaved by the Japanese army during the conflict, it’s clear how Abe’s conservative and revisionist nationalism found one of its targets in the ex-colony.
One of Abe’s goals as premier was to change Article 9 of the 1946 Constitution architected by the United States after defeating Japan in the Pacific War (1941-1945), which states that “the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes,” therefore “land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained”. Abe inherited these unfulfilled aspirations to resuscitate the country’s military sovereignty from his grandfather Kishi, who was suspected, though never charged, of war crimes.
While Abe never managed to change Article 9, the passing of security laws in 2015 to supply military aid to Japanese allies was “a watershed departure from Japan’s post-war pacifism,” Rob Fahey of Tokyo’s Waseda University told The Diplomat. Around 120,000 people participated in the protests, the largest since the 1960s, against the security laws. “By pushing it through despite public opposition, Abe succeeded in making more people lose faith in democracy,” Wakako Fukuda, co-founder of the SEALDs movement that emerged to oppose the laws, told Japan Times’ Deep Dive podcast. “People felt their voice and actions don’t matter anymore (and) that our movement failed”.
“Abe’s vision of democracy wasn’t one of free-wheeling debate,” Harris points out. “He wanted to move Japan away from a style of democracy that made room for minority opinions and compromise across party lines. ‘I have majorities, I control the government, I have policies I want to carry out’: this is the view he inherited from his grandfather. In his memoirs he talks about the importance of a leader standing two or three steps ahead of the public”.
Even though Abe’s vision of strong leadership translated into a more robust role for Tokyo internationally, his record on environmental policy, especially climate change, was disappointing to say the least. Japan is the fifth largest greenhouse gas emitter and its reliance on fossil fuels has increased since nuclear power production was halted following the 2011 Fukushima disaster. At the COP25 in Madrid, its government failed to renounce coal, which in 2018 accounted for 30 per cent of its energy mix against 18 per cent for renewables.
Notwithstanding its vulnerability to climate change, Japan still hasn’t improved its Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), sticking to a 26 per cent emissions reduction goal by 2030 – gravely insufficient to reach Paris Agreement targets. And while the current crisis caused by the pandemic offers important opportunities for adopting sustainable development models, the government’s economic stimulus package “only includes two points related to decarbonisation: digital transformation, and support for self-consumption type solar power plants,” Ken Tanaka, Japan Climate Initiative Secretariat, told Climate Foresight in an interview.
I want them to stop letting middle-aged men with outdated mindsets dictate everything in politics.
Abe was succeeded as premier by party member Yoshihide Suga, whose mandate lasted until the 2021 vote that saw the election of incumbent prime minister Fumio Kishida, also from the LDP. Abe’s legacy still shapes his successors’ rule and the entire country to this day, given his long stint in power, far-reaching policies and the fact that he remained an active and influential member of parliament and the governing party even after his resignation. Japan has lost one of its most influential political leaders and will now have to deal with the difficult questions that are emerging in the aftermath of this tragic event.
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