Abe-san, with the honorific suffix after the name to show respect, was one of the most prominent terms on Japanese social media this Friday. The shock of the assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is enormous: the last time anyone was assassinated was almost 90 years ago, during Japan’s radical militarism before the world war. It is not common for politicians to suffer attacks, with exceptions such as the 2007 assassination of the mayor of Nagasaki by the Japanese yakuza mafia. In 1994, a radical right-wing attempted to shoot the Prime Minister of the time, Morihiro Hosokawa, while he was carrying out a speech at a hotel, but Hosokawa was unharmed. That’s why the Japanese feel unsafe and vulnerable when they see Abe collapse bleeding in the middle of the street this Friday while holding a rally in the city of Nara.
Abe did not have the security perimeter that normally protects leaders in other countries, because in Japan, at least until now, such a deployment has been deemed unnecessary: It is one of the world’s lowest crime rates. Firearms are very difficult to move around the archipelago. They are controlled to the point where their owners have to pass exams, their mental health and criminal records are checked. But whether Yamagami Tetsuya, the prime suspect in Abe’s murder, managed to buy a gun or build one at home remains to be seen. Tetsuya, 41, who served in the Japanese army, is now unemployed and “dissatisfied” with Abe, he said upon arrest.
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Abe was assassinated while attending a campaign rally for the by-elections for the upper house of Japan’s parliament, which will be held next Sunday. In it, the Liberal Democratic Party (PLD), to which both Abe and current Prime Minister Kishida belonged, and which has ruled Japan all but two short brackets, hoped to revise its majority.
Abe headed Japan’s executive branch between 2012 and September 2020, resigning at the worst of the pandemic for alleged health reasons, though his management had been heavily questioned by then. But he never stopped influencing politics. As one of its key ideologues, he headed one of the PLD families most closely associated with the conservative right and the new Japanese nationalism.
He was undoubtedly the best-known Japanese politician abroad. As Oriol Farrés, an expert at CIDOB, says, we would have to go back to Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi [2001-2006] to find someone with so much charisma and so relevant to the rest of the world. Abe had a very clear vision, although not everyone liked it. Writer Akira Mizubayashi said that the spirits of the Japanese empire are still present in his mind. Among other things, because it has ramped up defense spending and because it has always taken a harsh stance on its neighbors, especially China. He openly defended a containment position towards Beijing in the naval conflicts in the Asia-Pacific region, choosing the United States, which is the main guarantor of Japanese security.
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His best-known legacy is Abenomics, the three-legged plan he launched in 2013 to steer his country out of the economic and mental crisis on the basis of monetary expansion, fiscal stimulus and structural reforms. It was a communication success but had mixed results. Politically, Abe always joined hands with Washington in defending a concept of the “free and open” Indo-Pacific, which later gave rise to the so-called Quad, the group formed by the United States, Japan, India and Australia. His major concern, like Joe Biden, is to counteract Beijing’s influence in the region.
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