Japan is mourning the death of Shinzo Abe, the longest-serving prime minister in the country’s history. Abe was murdered in broad daylight by an assassin while campaigning outside a train station in Nara on 8 July 2022 in support of a candidate from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) (Jiyū-Minshutō), just two days before the country’s upper house elections.

The trauma of the death of the former prime minister is compounded by the fact that it occurred in one of the world’s safest countries, where gun crime is almost unheard of.

Abe held several cabinet posts, including Chief Cabinet Minister from 2005 to 2006 during the term of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, before serving as Japan’s youngest post-war prime minister and president of the conservative LDP, first from 26 September 2006 to 26 September 2007, and then from 26 September 2012 to 14 September 2020, when he resigned.

In December 2012, Abe led the LDP to victory in the general elections for the House of Representatives, taking 294 seats out of 480, which constituted a comfortable majority.

According to Arthur Stockwin, Emeritus Professor of Japanese Politics, University of Oxford, Abe’s reelection for the presidency of the LDP was a surprise, as the party was not in the habit of reappointing “failed” leaders. His reelection nevertheless shows how formidable he was as a politician, and indeed the power base he had managed to build within the LDP.

Like many Japanese politicians, Abe was a product of hereditary politics, with a pedigree that is confirmed by the life of his maternal grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, a pre-war bureaucrat who reinvented himself as a politician, served in the wartime cabinet of Hideki Tojo, and was imprisoned as a suspected Class A war criminal after World War II by the occupation forces.

Kishi reemerged to serve as a right-wing LDP prime minister of Japan from 1957 to 1960, during which time he helped to reformulate the US-Japan Security Treaty in a failed attempt to rebalance the power relations between the two allies. Abe’s great-uncle, Kishi’s younger brother, Sato Eisaku, was prime minister of Japan from 1964 to 1972, the early period of Japan’s high economic growth.

Inspired by his pedigree, Abe — whose father, Shintaro Abe, was a prominent member of the LDP and foreign minister from November 1982 to July 1986 under prime minister Yasuhiro Nakasone — aspired to “make Japan great again”. Abe rode into politics on his grandfather’s nationalist passion, which manifested particularly in his hawkish policies toward China.

Until recently, a perennial question among scholars and observers of Japanese politics has been: where is power located in Japan? Following Prime Minister Koizumi’s attempts, Abe implemented institutional reforms in the structures of government to centralise the decision-making process to enhance the prime minister’s position, wresting power away from the bureaucrats. During his term as prime minister from 2012 to 2020, power in Japan was located in the Kantei, the prime minister’s office. 

There are two legacies of Abe that pervade the discourses about his term as prime minister, the most memorable of which is the raft of policies famously known as Abenomics, which, as the newly-elected prime minister in 2012, Abe outlined as the principles on which he would revive the Japanese economy, which had suffered stagnant growth since the early 1990s when Japan’s bubble economy burst.

The principle essentially involves three key points: “monetary easing” designed to achieve a 2% inflation target; a short-term flexible fiscal policy; and, finally, structural macroeconomic measures to encourage private sector investment and the expansion of consumption.

The macroeconomic policies also included deregulation in sectors such as energy, agriculture, pharmaceuticals, and the financial sector. In essence, Abenomics was about throwing the kitchen sink at an intractable problem, and in the end, it yielded little.

Nevertheless, Abenomics remains popular among the initiated within the LDP, to the extent that the current prime minister, Fumio Kishida, who took over from Abe, vowed to carry on with it at his inauguration, to the chagrin of the opposition.

Abe’s second legacy concerns his attempts to revise the Japanese constitution. The 1947 Constitution of Japan has been a contested document since its inception and drafting by the US. The LDP grandees from the early postwar period, including Kishi, viewed Article 9 of the constitution in particular as emasculating Japan, precisely because it contains a “no war” clause, which formally renounces war as a right of sovereignty and refuses to settle international disputes using military force.

The clause categorically states that “…land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential will never be” maintained by Japan, and “the right of belligerency of the state will not be recognised”.

Wearing his grandfather’s mantle, Abe was determined to amend the post-war constitution to change its pacifist ethos to fit with what he and members of the Japan Association (Nippon kaigi), an extreme right-wing organisation, which counts among its members a large majority of LDP Diet members, see as Japan’s correct national image and sovereignty.

Failing to revise the constitution, Abe announced its reinterpretation to allow for military action in conjunction with allies to assist collective self-defence with the US, in order to strengthen the Japan-US military alliance. Thus, in international affairs, Abe, as with his grandfather Kishi before him, remained steadfastly in support of the US hegemonic order.

With regard to Africa, Abe presided over three summits of the Tokyo International Conference on African Development (Ticad), Japan’s multilateral flagship for economic cooperation with African countries.

He used the powers of the prime minister’s office, the Kantei, to energise Japan’s economic ministries, such as the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industries (Meti), and the Japanese private sector to be more proactive towards the Ticad initiative, which had been orchestrated solely by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs since it was pioneered in 1993 essentially as an advisory platform for Africa’s economic development that would not be supported by financial pledges from Japan.

In a sense, Abe interrogated the nature of Japan’s relations with Africa in an attempt to make it more business-like, moving away from the rhetoric of aid, to see how viable Ticad could be in the context of his own efforts to revive the Japanese economy through Abenomics.

It was during his term that the original idea of holding Ticad summits every five years in Japan was revised to every three years, and to alternate hosting between Japan and an African country. Consequently, the first Ticad summit to be held in Africa was in Nairobi in 2016, and the second will be held in Tunisia in August 2022.

Perhaps more than his grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, and of any other post-war Japanese prime ministers, Abe’s legacy as a politician is outstanding, not least because he was the longest-serving prime minister in Japan, because of his attempts to reform the constitution, and because of his bold attempts to confront China’s hegemonic rise, which he saw as a threat to Japan’s national security.

In relation to Africa, more than any previous Japanese prime ministers, Abe tried to sensitise the Japanese private sector to the business prospects of the continent. DM