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Shinzo Abe, Japan’s defeated ideologue |
TOKYO: When he took office last year, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was the face of a new Japan: young, assertive and on a mission to roll back the legacy of World War II defeat.
But for many of the voters who slapped him with a stinging election rebuke yesterday, Abe’s government has come to symbolise not change but the dirty, rough-and-tumble backroom politics of earlier generations.
The new image of Abe’s rule could be seen last week in his scandal-plagued farm minister, Norihiko Akagi, who turned up to a recent cabinet meeting like a defeated boxer, with conspicuously large bandages on his unshaven cheeks.
Such travails were just the latest problem to beset Abe, who was expected to come under pressure to resign after the election drubbing, despite his pledge late Sunday that he would stay on.
His cabinet has been rocked by incessant scandals, with two ministers quitting and another — Akagi’s predecessor — committing suicide.
It all was supposed to turn out quite differently for Abe. A third-generation politician, the mild-mannered Abe was groomed from birth for the job by his elite, conservative family.
His grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, was a World War II cabinet member and was briefly jailed as a war criminal. Kishi later became a post-war prime minister and risked his career to build a new alliance with the United States.
In September, Abe became the nation’s first premier born after the war and the youngest in post-war times. He vowed a new era was upon Japan.
“Our generation has a responsibility to establish the Japan of the era when today’s children will be adults,” Abe, 52, said last week. “We should never shy away from reform, regardless of how strong the resistance may be.”
Japanese media initially likened Abe’s style to that of a US president, with cameras zooming in on how he would walk hand-in-hand with his wife Akie — unusual in a country where politicians’ spouses rarely appear in public.
With a slogan of building a “beautiful country” proud of its past, Abe quickly got to work on conservative causes such as rewriting the pacifist constitution imposed by Washington after the war. Abe first came to public prominence through his tough talk on North Korea, which has continued throughout his 10 months in office.
But he has reached out to China and South Korea, whose ties with Japan were tense under previous prime minister Junichiro Koizumi due to a dispute linked to war memories.
Even though China has embraced Abe as a welcome change, he has struggled at home to fills the shoes of the flamboyant and popular Koizumi.
Koizumi vowed to destroy the ruling Liberal Democratic Party in order to save it. He won a sweeping mandate in 2005 by casting opponents of free-market reforms within the party as the enemy.
In a gentle rebuke to Koizumi, one of his mentors, Abe said he would rule by consensus. He filled his cabinet with party stalwarts and readmitted lawmakers thrown out of the LDP by Koizumi for opposing his postal privatisation plan.
But a top aide earlier this year suggested that some cabinet members did not even bother to stop talking when the young premier entered the room.
“The problem is that Koizumi changed the expectations,” said Jeffrey Kingston, a scholar at Temple University in Tokyo.
“Koizumi was always sending short messages ready to order for the evening news and repeating them. But Abe goes on and on,” he said.
Abe’s approval ratings went into freefall after the pensions agency admitted it bungled millions of payment records — a sensitive issue in a rapidly ageing country.
Abe’s problem is that his basic goals “aren’t necessarily in tune with voters,” said political scientist Ikuo Kabashima.
“He is essentially interested in ideological issues and not the day-to-day concerns of the Japanese.”–AFP |
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