Abe was no stranger to this past. In 1960, during massive demonstrations over security treaty revisions, Abe’s grandfather, then prime minister Nobusuke Kishi, was stabbed by a rightist youth angry over Kishi’s perceived betrayal of the nation.
Assessments of Abe’s impact on national affairs have been intensely contested. On one hand are those who praise his accomplishments in national defence and foreign affairs. On the other are detractors who denounce the ethical tawdriness and democratic erosion which marred Abe’s tenure. Yet neither the achievements nor failings of the man tell us much about the historical forces that made Abe possible, and how those forces will play out in a future without him.
On the face of it, Abe’s political assassination has a two-fold meaning. The most obvious is that it breaks the spell of a decade (2012–22) in which Abe stamped his authority on Japanese politics through a combination of electoral success and willingness to use the levers of high office to cajole and dominate his opponents. Twice in a decade, Abe marshalled a spectrum of powerful conservative forces behind his cabinet leadership, ending the political instability of a revolving door premiership.
As the international environment changed, Abe displayed considerable skill in galvanising public support for reform of the institutions and laws of national defence and education. As former prime minister, Abe remained a powerbroker through his control over the largest faction in the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and an allegiance of votaries in the high bureaucracy.
When we extend our historical perspective further back, the question posed by Abe’s murder is whether we have reached the end of the period of conservative politics defined by Kishi. A straight line runs between Kishi and the present, linking Japan’s conservative elite to the wartime and imperialist era.
A brilliant technocrat, though by no means unpolitical, Kishi was responsible for the coercive effort that steeled Japan through four years of total war. Even as Japan lost the ‘battle of the factories’, Kishi resisted ending the war. As leader of the National Defence Brotherhood, he encouraged scorched earth tactics and sacrificial destruction, going as far as to support a bloody military uprising to halt the surrender. In 1945 Kishi was arrested as a suspected Class A war criminal. He was rehabilitated three years later, and in 1957 named Japan’s ninth post-war prime minister.
In political style and attitudes, Kishi exemplified the reinventions made by the Japanese wartime elite from the prerogatives of empire and imperial competition to the Cold War politics that crystallised post-war conservatism. Kishi set the trajectory of modern conservative politics in managerial and non-democratic directions — LDP rule backboned by a system of money politics, bureaucratic interest and partnership with the United States.
In a dramatic demonstration of the past in the present, the motivations of Abe’s assassin, Tetsuya Yamagami, intersect with the alliances Kishi cemented between the LDP and anti-communist and spiritual movements based in Taiwan and Korea, that became integral to Japanese conservative politics. This included the extensive electoral collaboration forged with the Unification Church, known now as the Family Federation of World Peace and Unification.
Arriving on the Japanese political scene in 1993, Abe was disarmingly frank about his political genealogy. As a young parliamentarian, Abe’s connections with Kishi were a valuable asset in a system dominated by political dynasties. Inheriting Kishi’s skill to cultivate alliances with the nationalist and religious right, Abe portrayed himself as an avowed opponent of the historical viewpoint rooted in the Tokyo War Crime Trials of 1945–48, a position which served him well in the years to come.
But the similarities between Abe and Kishi hide the differences that divided both men. Kishi, for instance, embraced a vision of state and economy which held that unfettered capitalism should be strictly controlled by government to increase wealth and productive power in the name of national unity. In contrast, Abe promoted the financialisation of Japanese markets and embraced deregulation and free market competition as conservative concerns.
Abe’s historical revisionism did not just concern war and empire. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Abe wrote regularly for centre-right journals, utilising Japan’s powerful conservative media to recast the reputation of Kishi’s premiership as one of economic achievement and strong national leadership. It was a startling reinvention for a man whose name was strongly associated with pre-war authoritarianism and corrupt government–business relations for decades.
Abe’s most important innovation was to take Kishi’s political program — which was tied to the exigencies of occupation and Cold War politics — and develop it into his own modern day battle slogan: ‘overcome the post-war regime’. This meant revision of the US-imposed constitutional order to promote a new moral and spiritual infrastructure to sustain remilitarisation and reinforce the American position in East Asia. Abe’s call to ‘overcome the post-war regime’, represented a process of borrowing and forgetting, reconnecting and updating the preoccupation of mid-twentieth century conservatives to the post-Cold War world, most prominently in his well-known tract, Towards a Beautiful Country.
The unanswered question at the heart of Japanese politics now is whether the ambition to ‘overcome the post-war regime’ that Abe personified can be maintained by his successors. It is ironic that the premiership — and death — of a man who spent a decade sanitising Kishi’s reputation now marks the end of a period when Kishi served as an important reference for Japanese conservatives. More than 30 years after Kishi’s death, the era of Japanese conservatism dominated by politics of defeat, military occupation and the Cold War seems to have reached its denouement. But the controversial legacies of the Kishi era will continue to reverberate through Japanese politics for years to come.
Andrew Levidis is a historian of modern Japan at The Australian National University.