Nuclear North Korea, aggressive China accelerate path to military activism
by Ayako Doi
The shocking assassination of Japan’s former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe last week is ironic in so many ways. For starters, it’s ironic that such blazing gun violence occurred in Japan, where crime rates are low and gun ownership is minuscule. Then, two days after his passing, Japanese voters elected enough members of his ruling coalition to make it possible for his successors to finally initiate the process to realize Abe’s lifelong political objective—revising Japan’s no-war constitution. It’s unclear how much Abe’s demise helped his Liberal Democratic Party garner extra sympathy votes, though investigations on the gunman so far found no political motive
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| YOKOSUKA |
To understand Abe’s political ambitions, one must look at his family tree. His father, Shintaro Abe, was a mainstream LDP politician in the 1970s and 1980s, serving in several important party and cabinet positions, including the minister of foreign affairs. Married to the daughter of post-World War II Prime Minister Nobuseke Kishi, whose brother Eisaku Sato was also a charismatic prime minister, he was widely expected to be a prime minister one day. Tragically he succumbed to illness and died in 1986, just when his ascent to power seemed so close to becoming a reality. Shinzo’s younger brother, Nobuo Kishi, was adopted by the Kishi family. He is also a LDP politician, currently serving as defense minister.
Married Up
Shintaro began his career as a newspaper reporter, but soon after his arranged marriage to Kishi’s daughter Yoko in 1951, he quit the paper and became his father-in-law’s political secretary. Throughout Kishi’s years as foreign minister, and later prime minister, the couple lived in the official residence with Kishi, while Shintaro served as his assistant.
Yoko, now 94, has often been called “the godmother” among LDP politicians, because of her penchant for giving advice and directives to Shinzo and other political family members. Abe’s detractors say that it was Yoko who instilled in Shinzo a mission to redeem her father’s reputation, which had been tarnished by his controversial political life, including a Class-A war criminal designation because of his prominent position in Hideki Tojo’s wartime cabinet—and to fulfill her father’s obsession with revising the U.S.-imposed Constitution. In addition to the very liberal democratic ideas scattered throughout the constitution, Article 9 of the document stipulates that Japan forever renounce the use of force as a means of settling international conflicts, and prohibits maintenance of any military capability—a rule that has been steadily eroded through the decades.
Kishi escaped prosecution as a war criminal, while Tojo and six other of his colleagues were executed, because some Japan experts in the U.S. saw in him a capable leader who would help remake Japan into a stalwart U.S. ally and a bastion of anti-Communism. He was installed as prime minister in 1957 with President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s blessings, and spent his three years in office working doggedly to revise and ratify the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, signed at the end of the Allied occupation to allow the U.S. forces to stay in the country to protect it, while Japan remained disarmed. Though the treaty was ratified, the government's strong-arm tactics prompted massive anti-U.S. demonstrations, which forced Eisenhower to cancel his impending trip to Tokyo, followed by Kishi’s resignation in disgrace. Yoko carried her father’s humiliation with her, and passed it on to Shinzo when he became prime minister, with a renewed hope for a constitutional revision.
Abe’s first term as prime minister, however, was marred by internal squabbles and scandals. His indecisive leadership style also got him in trouble on economic and foreign policy issues. A year later, before he could even broach the subject of a constitutional revision, he was forced to resign to take responsibility for a disastrous parliamentary election loss. Reports at the time said he suffered a nervous breakdown.
Abe’s Comeback
Abe was much better prepared when he returned to power in 2012. With a firm understanding that none of his political agenda could be advanced unless voters feel economically secure, he decided to tackle deflationary cycles gripping the country by introducing bold and controversial stimulus measures, including setting an inflationary target of 2%. The measures, collectively dubbed “Abenomics,” didn’t solve all the problems, but the stock market boomed and unemployment fell. The large crowd that showed up at his funeral suggests that Abenomics gave hope and livelihood to many Japanese, especially the young.
Abe also understood that a Japanese leader cannot stay in office for long without a good relationship with the occupant of the White House, and astutely played the role of a faithful friend to both Barack Obama and Donald Trump. When he saw that Trump couldn’t be counted on to advance his goal of creating the Trans Pacific Partnership to check China’s economic and security expansions, he shifted his efforts for the formation of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QUAD) with the U.S., Australia and India. With a mild personality and quiet self-confidence, he got along well with other world leaders and earned a reputation as a reliable partner, raising Japan’s profile around the globe.
Abe’s popularity, and the lack of a viable opposition, translated into a stable majority for the LDP and its partner, Komeito, in a series of elections during his administration. But to initiate a process towards Abe’s ultimate goal of revising the constitution, the pro-revision forces needed to secure two thirds of the seats in both houses of the Diet—a feat which had been elusive until the Upper House election last Sunday.
Newly elected Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, 65, said Sunday that he would present the proposal for the revision “as soon as possible.” But first, the proponents of the revision need to agree on what they want to change and how.
Even among those calling for the revision of Article 9, there are differences on what the wording should be. Others are more interested in codifying limits on the government’s power and citizens’’ rights. The Covid-19 pandemic raised concerns about how much sacrifice the government can ask of people and businesses. After all is agreed and approved by the Diet, the proposal must be presented to the Japanese public for a national referendum. It’s a long process which has never been tried.
Radical No More
Even if Article 9 is revised, don’t expect a sea change in Japan’s military posture. Japan already has a very sizable military structure, established soon after the war at the behest of the U.S., which needed Japan as an ally in the Cold War. In the last few decades the Self Defense Forces, as they are called, have steadily been expanding their deployment in support of U.S. forces in Japan and peacekeeping operations abroad. Joint operations with the U.S., once understood to be prohibited by the constitution, has long been tolerated by an administrative interpretation, and when Prime Minister Abe made it official in a cabinet decree in 2014, he faced virtually no opposition.
Indeed, the once-radical idea to remilitarize Japan, pushed by Abe’s maternal grandfather Nobusuke Kishi, is not so radical these days. North Korea’s nuclearization and the increasingly clear threat of China’s territorial expansion in recent years have succeeded to convert a once staunchly pacifist Japanese public into proponents of more robust military capability. China, North Korea and now Russia, which grabbed Japan’s northernmost territories in days just before Japan’s surrender in 1945, are helping Tokyo achieve the goals which Kishi and Abe failed to achieve.
Ayako Doi is the former co-founder of The Japan Digest.
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