The most vivid childhood memory of the man who will soon become Japan’s 57th prime minister places him squarely on the lap of his grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, the 37th person to hold that office. Shinzo Abe was five years old and Japan was in the throes of violent demonstrations. Angry crowds had surrounded prime minister Kishi’s home in the fashionable Tokyo district of Shibuya, shouting abuse at the grandfatherly figure bouncing the young Shinzo on his knee.
The year was 1960. Kishi was about to revise the 1951 US-Japan Security Treaty, strengthening Washington’s responsibility for the defence of a Japan formally stripped of its military capability. The revision was hated by those on the left, many of whom wanted Japan to become a neutral power, not Washington’s unsinkable aircraft carrier in the Pacific. There had been a month of riots in which at least 500 people had been injured.
The crowd outside Kishi’s house was chanting “Down with Ampo,” using the Japanese abbreviation for the US-Japan treaty. As one of Abe’s friends tells it, the young boy began to repeat the catchy slogan: “Down with Ampo. Down with Ampo.” His grandfather chuckled, explaining that the protesters had got it wrong. Little Abe must say: “Yes to Ampo. Yes to Ampo.”
Abe (pronounced Ah-bay) recounts the scene in his book, To a Beautiful Country, published this summer by way of introducing his beliefs to a public that has no say in his imminent selection as prime minister. Japanese leaders are picked by the ruling party, in effect the Liberal Democrats, who have held office for all but 11 months of the past half century.
Abe’s interpretation of his grandfather’s stance was that he was serving Japan’s kokueki, its national interest, the core of Abe’s political credo and the key to understanding the likely tenor of his premiership.
The 1960 treaty was vital for Japan’s security, Abe contends. The document tilted things back in Japan’s favour, making it less humiliating than the treaty imposed in 1951, the year Japan recovered its independence after occupation. Kishi secured the revision in the teeth of opposition, but it cost him dear. In July 1960, having rammed ratification through an obstreperous parliament, he resigned.
“This is the way Abe was educated,” says Hisayuki Miyake, a family friend, referring to the lap-top tutorials in realpolitik that the young boy received from his grandfather.
The story has much to reveal. First, it shows that Abe was born to be prime minister. Not for nothing do people call him “The Prince”. Abe has imbibed the family business - statesmanship - from birth. Kishi was not the only Abe relation to make it to the top. Only four years after he quit, Kishi’s younger brother and Abe’s great uncle, Eisaku Sato, became prime minister and served nearly eight years. (Kishi had been born a Sato, but was adopted.) It would have been a hat-trick for the clan had Abe’s father Shintaro, who married Kishi’s daughter, not been robbed of his prime ministerial ambitions by pancreatic cancer.
Many of Abe’s friends say his smooth progress to the prime ministership is nothing less than fate. To the manor born, Abe is claiming the right so cruelly snatched from his much-admired father.
Keiichiro Nakamura, a long-time acquaintance, says: “It weighs very heavily on Abe that his father didn’t realise his dream. Abe strongly believes that his own destiny is to become prime minister.”
Abe’s blue-blood makes him entirely different from Junichiro Koizumi, the maverick politician he will almost certainly succeed. (Barring a political earthquake, or perhaps a real one, the Liberal Democratic Party will elect Abe as Koizumi’s successor on Wednesday, a decision that will be rubber-stamped by parliament a few days later.) Abe turns 52 on Thursday, which will make him the youngest prime minister in 65 years.
Koizumi, too, is a third-generation politician. But his grandfather started out as a stevedore whose body was plastered in a dragon tattoo, a decoration more often associated with Japanese gangsters than with its aristocrats. Unlike Abe, whose election is virtually assured, Koizumi’s took many people by complete surprise.
The second lesson to be learnt at Kishi’s knee is what granddaddy did in the war. From 1936 Kishi was a top official in Manchukuo, the Japanese puppet state in Inner Manchuria, the long-contested region in northern China. In 1941, he was appointed commerce and industry minister in the wartime cabinet of General Hideki Tojo, a man subsequently hanged for war crimes by the Tokyo Tribunal, Asia’s version of Nuremberg.
Kishi was arrested by the US occupying forces in 1945 on suspicion of war crimes and imprisoned for three years. Though never tried, he was banned from public affairs until a purge of the old regime was lifted in 1952. Within five years, he was prime minister.
Abe resents the taint of war criminal that wafts around his grandfather’s memory. Like many conservatives, he doubts the view that Japan’s forays into Asia were any worse than western imperialism, or that Japan was uniquely wicked during the second world war. His strong support of the US-Japan alliance notwithstanding, he disputes the legitimacy of what he regards as the American show trial at which Tojo and others were condemned.
A belief that Japan’s war was not so dishonourable is part of the reason Abe visits Yasukuni shrine, a symbol of Japanese nationalism hated by the Chinese who bore the brunt of Japan’s invasion. Yasukuni, an elegant and peaceful Shinto shrine planted with cherry trees and set back from the thrum of downtown Tokyo, honours the spirits of 2.5 million war dead who fought in the emperor’s name. Among them are 14 wartime leaders, including Tojo, designated as “Class A war criminals”. When Koizumi visits Yasukuni, annual pilgrimages that have inflamed passions across Asia, he explicitly states his remorse for Japan’s wartime aggression. Abe is less forthcoming.
The postwar settlement allowed Japan to build a strong economy, but has deprived it of the other great ambition it has held since the Meiji Restoration: to be a strong nation. For 60 years, Japan has punched considerably below its weight. Its constitution, hurriedly written by idealist young Americans in the occupation administration of General Douglas MacArthur, formally bans it from having a military or from ever again waging war.
Under the prevailing interpretation of that constitution Japan voluntarily forgoes its right to collective self-defence. The nation’s security thus depends entirely on Washington, but if, say, a US battleship were hit by a North Korean missile in Tokyo Bay, Japan could not lift a finger to help.
Hisahiko Okazaki, a former ambassador and a conservative thinker described by one friend as “Abe’s brain”, says one of the first things Abe will do is to scrap the ban on mutual self-defence. “This is pseudo-constitutional,” he says of the self-imposed restriction. “To me and Abe this interpretation is ridiculous even though it has held for half a century. It is very easy to change.”
I have been to see Okazaki twice in his office in Toranomon, Tiger’s Gate, not far from the political whirl of Nagatacho, Tokyo’s Capitol Hill. His office is crammed with ancient Thai pottery collected when he was ambassador to Bangkok, as well as Japanese calligraphic scrolls, black and white photographs and a biography of Margaret Thatcher, a leader admired by both Abe and Koizumi. He is casually dressed in a thin cotton jacket and loose-fitting pants, like an academic. He prefers to think of himself as an intelligence officer, something Japan is officially banned from having, gathering and interpreting useful information, 95 per cent of which he says is freely available. He spends much of our two discussions jumping up and down to retrieve another document or a newspaper comment article that has caught his eye.
Summing up the twin influences of Abe’s family background, Okazaki says: “Abe is born in the ruling class and identifies himself with the nation. In him, both are important elements of hinkaku, or dignity; to be a man worthy of respect and to build a nation worthy of respect.”
There is at least one more powerful influence at work in Abe, according to Okazaki. That is the inspiration of the hometown where his family has its roots. Although Abe was born and educated in Tokyo, his political blood courses through Yamaguchi, a prefecture on the far western tip of Japan’s main island. Abe’s father built his political career there. When he died in 1991, Abe inherited the devotion of his Shimonoseki constituency, which returns him with massive majorities.
Yamaguchi sits at the heart of what was once Choshu, one of four fiefdoms that rose up in 1867 against the 250-year-old feudal rein imposed by the Tokugawa clan. The overthrow of the last Tokugawa shogun - who kept rule over his closed, samurai-policed nation from Tokyo - ended 250 years of Japanese isolation and launched it on the path of modern industrialisation. The rebels rallied in the name of the emperor of the period, Meiji, so this revolution is known as the Meiji restoration. It restored the Japanese emperor to a position of importance after centuries as an isolated and purely symbolic figure under various shogunates.
The catalyst for their rebellion had been the arrival off the Japanese coast in 1853 of the heavily armed “Black Ships” of Commodore Matthew Perry. The American commander was a gun-boat diplomat whose show of force was supposed to persuade Japan to open up, much like other Asian nations had done, to free trade and the hated “unequal treaties”. The Tokugawa period had placed severe restrictions on contact with foreigners, thus hampering Japan’s ability to learn new technology, including the art of war. The Meiji leaders, notably those of Choshu, decided that Japan needed to open up and transform its society if the country was not to fall into the grasping hands of foreign barbarians. Their working thesis was to know thy enemy.
“Abe has the tradition of Choshu behind him,” says Okazaki. “He is concerned about the state, not just about the prefecture. Choshu people think in terms of Japan’s national interest.”
National interest is the central theme of Abe’s political life. He became truly famous in 2002 as the man who stood up to North Korea’s Kim Jong-il, thereby restoring Japan’s pride. The background was the mysterious disappearance of dozens of Japanese citizens, mainly teenagers, snatched off beaches in the 1970s and 1980s. For years, Tokyo refused to acknowledge rumours that they had been abducted by North Korean spies.
In September 2002, Abe, then deputy cabinet secretary, accompanied Koizumi on an extraordinary visit to Pyongyang at which Kim admitted that his government had indeed been kidnapping Japanese. Moreover, five of them were still alive.
There is a photograph in Abe’s Shimonoseki office that illustrates how subsequent events propelled the then 47-year-old cabinet spokesman into becoming the leading contender to succeed Koizumi. It shows a large, heavy table at which Koizumi and Kim are signing the Pyongyang Declaration, an agreement laying out a path to normal diplomatic relations. While officials from both sides hover attentively, Abe alone stands removed from the table, glowering at the distasteful scene.
Abe was not happy with how things were going in Pyongyang. At lunch - the Japanese brought their own bento boxed meals from Tokyo, so frigid was the atmosphere - he had demanded that Koizumi extract an apology from Kim, something Kim agreed to do. When the five abductees returned to Japan on what was meant to be a short visit, it was Abe who insisted that they permanently remain.
Though initially criticised for “rekidnapping” the abductees, some of whom were separated from their children stranded in North Korea, he won public acclaim for standing up for Japan’s rights. Abe, who pressed for sanctions and defended Japan’s plans to build a missile defence to counter North Korean weapons, became the incarnation of Japan’s national interest. In short, he became a hero.
The concept of national interest has been weak in postwar Japan for two main reasons. First, a browbeaten country, ashamed of its war record, put economic growth above any notion of flexing its diplomatic muscles. Dependent on the US for its security, its “foreign policy” was a carbon copy of that printed in Washington.
Second, in the absence of ideology, postwar Japanese politics became largely about securing control of money. Politicians perfected the technique of funnelling funds to their local constituencies. One prime minister famously built a bullet train line to his provincial hometown in snowy Niigata. Politics was about securing local - not national - interests.
Five years of Koizumi have helped break that system, under strain since the money ran out when the bubble burst in 1990. Under Koizumi, the Liberal Democrats have been transformed into a party that relies on the urban as much as the rural vote, making government policy less subservient to regional dictates.
The idea that nation trumps region runs deeper in Choshu than perhaps anywhere else in Japan. So neatly, in fact, does the historical legacy of Choshu fit with Abe’s ideology that I decided to fly there to pick at Abe’s roots.
It is the height of summer and the day we arrive a typhoon has just whipped through, leaving a few bedraggled clouds in its wake. The cool of the early morning is giving way to intense heat. I have travelled with Junzo Matoba, a friend and campaigner for Abe. Matoba, an avuncular figure who breathes a self-confidence born of years of backroom influence, is 71, though he has the physique and stamina of a man far younger. As we drive through the rice paddies and head into the mountains, cicadas screeching all around, he treats me to a history lesson.
The first thing to know about Choshu - and perhaps Abe himself - is its consistency of resolve. The Tokugawa Shogunate established its feudal rule over Japan in 1600 when it defeated Choshu in the famous battle of Sekigahara. Power shifted to Edo, modern-day Tokyo. Choshu was forced to build its castle in Hagi, where we are now heading, an isolated coastal town that posed little threat to Tokugawa supremacy.
“The elders of Choshu met each year, always asking the same question: ‘Is it time?’” explains Matoba. “Each year, the answer came back: ‘Not yet.’” Then, after more than 250 years, with Japan under threat from barbarians, the elders determined that the time had arrived for Choshu to strike back.
Since the time of its successful rebellion, Choshu, now Yamaguchi prefecture, has produced seven prime ministers, more than anywhere else. As well as Kishi, Abe’s grandfather, and Sato, his great uncle, they include Hirobumi Ito, who became prime minister in 1885 under the system of constitutional monarchy established by the Meiji rebels. Yet more illustrious than any of these may well have been a Choshu leader who never made it to prime minister: Shoin Yoshida. Robert Louis Stevenson, little known outside Japan, wrote that Shoin deserved to be as famous as Garibaldi for his role in building a nation state.
Shoin was convinced that Japan must learn practical lessons from the west, from gun-manufacture to social organisation, if it were not to be overrun by foreigners. He was so bent on his mission that he defied a near-total ban on contact with foreigners. One night he rowed out to Perry’s Black Ship, the Mississippi, off the coast of Edo, in the hope of persuading the Commodore to smuggle him to America. Caught in the act, he was caged, returned to Hagi and eventually released. There he set up a small school - the main purpose of our visit - where many of Meiji’s most important leaders were inspired.
One of Shoin’s students was Shinsaku Takasugi, who died in 1867 aged 28 but who also had a profound influence on history. Takasugi was fiercely anti-foreign but like Shoin thought Japan needed to modernise if it were to fend off the barbarians. A samurai, his great innovation was to break with the feudal ban on non-samurai bearing arms. Instead, he recruited commoners. These fighting units, more professional than the samurai armies mustered by Tokugawa, were one of the Meiji rebellion’s most potent weapons.
It is from the Chinese character “Shin” of Shinsaku that both Shintaro Abe and his son Shinzo derive their name. There is thus an intimate link between Japan’s next prime minister and Shinsaku Takasugi, a founder of Japan’s modern military, and beyond him to Shoin Yoshida, intellectual father of the nation state.
When we reach Shoin’s school, located in a dusty courtyard, it is hard to conceive how such a tiny wooden building, just a few tatami mats wide, could have had such a dramatic impact. At the same complex is a small waxwork museum. As well as scenes of Shoin lecturing his disciples, there is a room in which the waxworks of the prefecture’s seven prime ministers are displayed. They include Kishi, wearing a house kimono, and Sato, looking stiff in a blue pinstriped suit. “Soon there’ll be an eighth,” says Matoba.
A small group of Abe supporters repairs to the Sea Heart restaurant, one that Abe himself is said to like. Inside, it feels like a municipal swimming baths. Low tables are arranged on tatami mats around a large pool in which eel, flounder and sole are cowering from the nets. My hosts are in festive mood, since this is August 20, precisely one month before the Liberal Democrats are due to elect Abe as their leader. “Let’s have a mae iwai, a pre-celebration,” says Matoba, raising his shot-sized beer glass for a kampai.
Soon the waitresses are bringing piles of succulent raw fish, all caught in local waters. There are thick slabs of raw octopus, thinly sliced flounder, bulging striped prawns that vie for length with the chopsticks and palettes of creamy orange sea urchin. Then comes tempura, whole grilled river fish, rice and miso soup.
As we tuck into the magnificent feast, talk turns to whom Abe will name in his cabinet and when he will make his first trip to Washington. Might the Chinese, fed up with years of frozen relations with Koizumi, agree to an official visit to Tokyo?
The conversation drifts to whether Abe is ready for the job. A politician for only 13 years, compared with his father’s 30, Abe has held top party posts but none of the great cabinet portfolios - foreign, finance or trade. Abe himself, though propelled by a sense of familial destiny, has also been held back by doubts. When his father, Shintaro, became foreign minister in 1982, Abe was working as an executive at Kobe Steel. He turned down his father several times before finally agreeing to give up business and join him, as secretary, on the political stage. Even when, last October, he was made chief cabinet secretary - an appointment that suggested Koizumi was grooming him as his heir - Abe was said to be in two minds.
Close allies such as Okazaki added to those doubts by suggesting he might step aside for an older man and take on the premiership next time round. Part of that advice was tactical. The Liberal Democrats face difficult upper house elections next July and, if they are trounced, the sitting prime minister might have to resign to take responsibility.
Yet the memory of his father’s hesitation, before he was diagnosed with cancer, of stepping aside to let another man take the prize, runs deep in Abe family legend. Miyake, a supporter of Abe senior, had told me: “Shinzo Abe’s mother, Yoko, is more proud of being the daughter of Kishi than the wife of Shintaro. When Shintaro missed his shot at being prime minister, she thought he should have fought for it harder. Some say that Abe’s mother told her son: ‘If you have a chance, you should grab it.’”
People around the table doubt whether it was Abe’s mother who pushed him forward. The story is that Abe has slowly steeled his nerves, convincing himself that the time is right to meet his destiny. One political observer says Abe has always used the more humble Japanese forms for “I” - watashi and boku - when referring to himself. Recently he has taken to using ore, more of a tough-guy word that signals he is ready for power.
The first time I saw Abe, he was standing under a cherry tree. He was surrounded by middle-aged ladies pressing to have their photograph taken at his side. Like Koizumi, Abe is considered an attractive man. But with his jet-black, neatly trimmed hair, and stern, yet somehow boyish, face, his looks are more conventional than those of his Elvis Presley-wannabe boss.
It was April 2003. That Abe was the centre of attention was striking. This was Koizumi’s annual cherry blossom-viewing party and he - not his deputy cabinet secretary - was meant to be the main attraction. But Koizumi’s popularity had temporarily dipped. As if symbolically, if memory serves me right, there were no blossoms on the trees, the party having been mistimed for that year’s bloom. Grace and favour appeared to be passing to Abe.
There were to be many ups and downs after that. Two years later, Koizumi defied convention by dissolving parliament and winning the most famous victory in the LDP’s history. But talk of Abe as Koizumi’s natural successor never faded.
The next time I saw Abe at close quarters was for an interview. It was in April last year. We met in the party’s bustling headquarters, where we convened in a room lined with leather-bound books. Abe, typically, was wearing a blue blazer and co-ordinated tie. I remember thinking he looked like the captain of a yacht.
The main topic then was Yasukuni shrine. Abe was vigorously defending Koizumi’s right to his annual pilgrimage, using the sort of forthright language against China that has earned him the reputation as a hawk. “China accuses us because it doesn’t understand the freedom of religion,” he said.
He became angry when pressed about Beijing’s suggestion that it might resume Sino-Japanese summits - suspended for the duration of Koizumi’s term - if the prime minister stopped his visits. “Yasukuni shrine is in Japan, and it is ridiculous to suggest that the prime minister can’t step on a particular spot on his own soil,” he thundered. “When they realise there is no room for negotiation, they will stop complaining.”
Japan, he said, was not sabre-rattling or lurching to the right. It was simply normalising after 60 years of defeated-nation syndrome. “From now on,” he said, warming to what will be the theme of his premiership, “we have to assert our national interest.”
That was the sort of rhetoric that a few months ago made some in the LDP, as well as in big business, worry that Abe might be the wrong man for the job. Japan’s economy is now heavily reliant on China, which has surpassed the US as its biggest trading partner. The last thing Japan needs, many argue, is more years of strained relations with Beijing.
Koichi Kato, a one-time close ally of Koizumi, worries that Abe stands for a revisionist view of history and a potentially inflammatory nationalism. Kato’s home was last month burned to the ground by a rightwing fanatic apparently angered at his critical statements about Yasukuni. Having torched the place, the assailant took a knife and tried - unsuccessfully - to commit seppuku, ritual suicide. “This kind of nationalism is very hard to calm down once leaders ignite it,” Kato told me a few days after the attack.
There are signs, though, that as Abe approaches office he is shifting to the centre ground. The last time we met, in April this year, he was already installed in the prime minister’s minimalist, strangely beautiful offices after being given the highly visible post of chief cabinet secretary. In the year since I had interviewed him, Abe had clearly grown used to the idea of becoming prime minister. On the previous occasion he had arrived alone. This time he swept in with a retinue of memo-jotting officials. Though clearly more confident, he was courteous and softly spoken.
I had come to talk about economics. Abe is basically wedded to Koizumi’s view of a liberal economy in which the private sector plays a larger role. But more than tax or deregulation, the topic that aroused most passion was my suggestion that he might be too inexperienced to be prime minister. It was time, he said, to scrap Japan’s slavish respect for seniority and generational sequence. “The Japanese place much importance on the idea that, if nothing happens to ruffle the [generational] order, it will be a peaceful world.”
On the subject of China, he struck a skilful balance between resoluteness and reasonableness that contrasted with his more heated rhetoric of a year before. “We mutually benefit because of our economic relationship,” he said. “We both know that. We have to keep that intact and not destroy it. That means continuing our dialogue. I would like to urge China to take a step forward by talking to us at a head-of-government level.”
There were even tentative signs that Abe might make some adjustments - he would never call them concessions - to help bring that about. He distanced himself from Koizumi’s rather rash pre-election promise to visit Yasukuni each year. Using phrasing calculated to keep people guessing, he said: “I have no intention whatsoever to make a declaration that I will go to the shrine.”
Months later it emerged that Abe had secretly visited Yasukuni only days before our encounter. The low-profile visit - which contrasted with the media circus of Koizumi’s annual pilgrimage - points to the way he might defuse the issue while remaining true to his principles.
Abe may have been born to be prime minister, yet it was not until this month, in a speech to party faithful in Hiroshima, that he formally announced what his family has been waiting a lifetime to hear: he would seek the nation’s top office. Standing beneath a voluminous sign proclaiming “Beautiful Country”, he said he intended to restore national self belief. “Japan has beautiful nature, culture and a long history. We should take pride in that.”
He would overhaul the education system, too long dominated by a “self-flagellatory” view of history. He would revamp social security so that Japan’s finances stood on firmer foundations. He would seek to rewrite a constitution penned by Americans. And he would remove self-imposed restrictions on Japan’s military.
His speech was dotted with references that resonate strongly in Choshu. He intended, he said, to govern in the national interest, and to ensure that the country was well defended as well as prosperous. To achieve that, Japan must be open to the world, so that new ideas flowed in to stimulate Japanese inventiveness and competitiveness. Japan, he said, could be open and strong at the same time. Shoin Yoshida and Shinsaku Takasugi, the Choshu rebels who helped found modern Japan, would have approved.
