The following is a transcript of an interview with Shinzo Abe, Japanese prime minister, by David Pilling, the FT’s Tokyo bureau chief.

Financial Times: You are the first Japanese prime minister born since the war. There are still some issues hanging over from the war. Do you think your premiership will be one in which Japan becomes, in a sense, a normal country, with a normal constitution, a normal military with a normal – perhaps a less apologetic – sense of its own history?