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The enigma of Shinzo Abe’s legacy

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Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe speaks at the ASEAN-Japan Summit in Bangkok, Thailand, 4 November, 2019 (Photo: Reuters/Tun).

In Brief

The question of Shinzo Abe’s legacy has been thrust into the spotlight by recent milestones. Abe overtook his great-uncle Eisaku Sato to become the longest serving post-war Japanese prime minister on 23 August this year. And on 20 November, Abe overtook Taro Katsura to become Japan’s longest-serving prime minister since the inception of parliamentary politics in Japan in 1889.

Beyond his longevity, what will Abe be most remembered for?

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Abe may have been nothing more than a historical footnote after a forgettable stint in the top job between September 2006 and September 2007. During this time he articulated his ambitions to revise Article 9, the ‘peace clause’ of Japan’s post-war Constitution, and introduce patriotic education; presided over a cabinet that suffered a number of scandals; and lost an upper house election. He resigned facing criticism that he was out of touch with ordinary Japanese.

Luck provided Abe a rare second chance. In December 2012 he led the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) back into government. Abe unified the LDP behind him; won six consecutive elections against a weak and fractured opposition; ended the revolving door of six prime ministers in six years (2006–2012); and restored political stability. During this period of political stabilisation, Abe has sought to revitalise the Japanese economy and to establish a more proactive and muscular foreign and security policy.

Yet, while Abe has implemented many changes, no single initiative stands out as the legacy he will burnish when he ultimately steps down. The question of Abe’s legacy is also complicated by the enigma of his political instincts. On the one hand, Abe has displayed pragmatism and practiced the politics of the possible. On the other hand, his ideological bent — including his call to escape the post-war regime, his whitewashing wartime history and his association with right-wing lobby groups such as Nippon Kaigi — has often lurked prominently in the background.

After five years in the political wilderness (2007–2012), Abe rightly concluded that economic policy was the key to longevity in power. Japan’s two longest serving post-war prime ministers before Abe were Shigeru Yoshida, who set the course for Japan’s post-war recovery, and Eisaku Sato, who oversaw Hayato Ikeda’s ‘income doubling’ plan in the 1960s.

Abe’s focus on his economic policy package, Abenomics, aimed to revitalise the economy through three arrows: monetary easing, fiscal stimulus and structural reform. The firing of the politically easy and pathway smoothing first two arrows brought him some initial success. But the failure to follow through properly with the third and most important structural reform arrow has meant that Abenomics is yet to deal with the whole burden of Japan’s demographic crisis.

Abe has been lauded as an international leader on free trade. As Sheila Smith explains in one of two lead essays this week, ‘Abe committed Japan to participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership and went on to become its strongest regional proponent. … [A]fter the United States elected [Donald Trump], who would abandon the idea, Abe went on to conclude the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP or TPP-11)’ as well as the Japan–EU Economic Partnership Agreement. Yet, among other things, the debate about whether Japan has weaponised its trade against South Korea — in retaliation against the South Korean Supreme Court’s ruling on the use of forced labour by Japanese companies during the Second World War — has tarnished trade leadership as a potential legacy.

On security policy, the Abe government reinterpreted Article 9 in July 2014 and passed the implementing security-related bills in September 2015 which enable the Japan Self-Defense Forces to exercise limited forms of collective self-defence in cases where an attack against an ally threatens Japan’s survival. Breaching the post-war ban on collective self-defence was controversial. It has been hailed by proponents as a watershed reform which will bolster the deterrence power of the US–Japan alliance but condemned by critics as a slippery slope towards war-fighting and constitutional revision by stealth. How this change will actually work in practice remains largely untested.

On the US–Japan alliance, ‘Abe will surely be remembered for his unorthodox courting of the irascible President Donald Trump’, Smith argues. Yet despite Abe’s Trump whisperer skills, ‘this has not inoculated Japan from the imposition of tariffs on steel and aluminium or from the threat of tariffs on autos and it is highly unlikely that Abe will be able to avoid Trump’s demands on Japan for an exorbitant increase in host nation support when negotiations begin next year’.

In our second lead essay, Hugo Dobson suggests that Abe may best be remembered for ‘centralising decision-making authority within … the ‘prime ministerial executive’. This includes the establishment in December 2013 of ‘a US-style National Security Council in the Prime Minister’s Office’. It was through this new institutional architecture that the Abe government was able to coordinate both the reinterpretation of Article 9 and the security-related bills as well as the conclusion of CPTPP.

But this also raises some questions. ‘How transferable will this model of centralised authority be to future prime ministers’? And how can the benefits of centralised coordination be reaped while ensuring professionalism in policy making? The series of scandals surrounding bureaucrats surmising (sontaku) the Prime Minister’s intentions and dispersing favours to Abe’s friends and allies, such as the Moritomo and Kake corruption, and now the ‘cherry blossom viewing’ scandals, suggest that fine tuning is needed.

The biggest reason, perhaps, why the question of Abe’s legacy is still up in the air is because his most cherished goal, formally amending Article 9 through constitutional revision, is still unrealised. Abe has just under two years until his term as leader of the LDP runs out in September 2021 and maintains his steadfast intention to press forward with the debate on constitutional reform. But, as Smith concludes, ‘convincing his own citizens that they must prepare for a world in which hard power has become a far more necessary tool for Japan’ may be a hurdle too far.

While Abe’s ultimate legacy remains unclear, how he chooses to deploy his political capital during his last stretch — on Abenomics and on Article 9 — may ultimately determine whether historians emphasise Abe’s pragmatic or his nationalist face.

The EAF Editorial Board is located in the Crawford School of Public Policy, College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National University.

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