Friend of India, Shinzo Abe to be Japan’s youngest PM

With LDP enjoying a huge majority in Diet, Abe’s election as successor to Junichiro Koizumi, the outgoing prime minister, is now a mere formality. Abe, who celebrates his 52nd birthday tomorrow, will also be his country’s first premier born after World War II, a psychologically important line of separation in modern Japanese history.

Like Rajiv Gandhi, Abe is both young and strikingly good-looking. But there is a more important similarity: lineage. His grandfather Nobusuke Kishi was the prime minister of Japan in 1950s. His great-uncle, Eisaku Sato, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1974, was also Japan’s prime minister for eight years (1964-72). His father, Shintaro Abe, was foreign minister in the 1980s. Known as “the prince” of Japanese politics, he was widely tipped to become prime minister, but liver cancer killed him in 1991.

Abe belongs to the LDP faction led by former Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori. He was also backed by Koizumi, who won for his party a sweeping victory in last year’s parliamentary elections by seeking people’s support for a contentious reform initiative to privatize postal services. (Post office savings in Japan are $3 trillion or nearly Rs 14, 000,000 crore).

Last week, NHK, which is Japan`s main TV channel, got all the three LDP presidential candidates for a live debate in a popular programme called “Sunday Project”. Abe came across as a natural winner — cool, composed, unfazed by tough questions, and persuasively articulate. Although he got 66% of the votes in the party election, popular backing for Abe, as revealed in opinion polls, has touched 80%. This support is less on account of his political pedigree and more due to his firm nationalist platform.

“It’s been 61 years since the end of World War II and we need to start working toward creating a Japan that’s suitable for the 21st century,” Abe said during a speech in August. He has declared his determination to make Japan a “normal nation”, like any other independent and sovereign member of the international community.

As part of this endeavour, he has pledged to replace his country’s 1945 constitution, which was imposed by America’s occupation force on a Japan defeated and devastated in World War II, by a new constitution “written by Japanese hands”.

In fact, Americans wrote important parts of that constitution in English, and handed them to the late Emperor Hirohito for translation into Japanese. The most contentious Article 9 of that constitution bars Japan from maintaining its own military. Abe is dubbed as “hawkish” for wanting Japan to play a more assertive role in international affairs.

In some ways, Koizumi himself started an assertive foreign policy by defiantly visiting the Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo, where a large number of Japanese soldiers who died in various wars are buried. The shrine also has the graves of some war criminals who committed atrocities in imperial Japan’s depredations in China and Korea. Both Beijing and Seoul strongly objected to Koizumi’s Yasukuni visit and demanded apology for Japan’s wartime conduct.

Japan’s relations with China and the two Koreas is one of the main issues discussed in Japan these days. Abe has accepted that “Japan caused great damage and suffering to several Asian countries, particularly China and South Korea”. This, in fact, echoes the thinking of a majority of Japanese people today.

At the same time, Abe has also articulated the annoyance of most Japanese by asking, “How many times must Japan apologise?” Japan Times, an English-language newspaper, last week published a list of 20 occasions since 1945 when successive governments in Tokyo have either apologised or taken punitive action against those who praised imperial Japan’s wartime atrocities.

Noting that many former colonial powers around the world did many wrong things in the past, Abe has claimed that “there are different perceptions of who did what and why”. Therefore, he says, “Let us leave the analyses of historical facts primarily to historians.” Hence, Japan’s new PM’s message to its neighbours is: “Let’s bury the past and build a friendly and cooperative future together.”

What is hardly known in our country is that Japan’s next PM is a great friend of India. In one of his policy speeches, he has called for a “strategic dialogue with USA, India, Australia and EU countries” that “share common values” with Japan. Notice that India comes next only to US in his foreign policy vision.

Vibhav Kant Upadhyay, chairman of the India Center Foundation, a Tokyo-based NGO which seeks to promote stronger ties between India and Japan, has closely interacted with Abe for the past six years. “Abe San (san is the Japanese equivalent of the respectful Indian suffix ji) passionately believes in the concept of India-Japan global partnership, which was enshrined in the agreement between Prime Ministers Mori and Vajpayee in 2000. He subscribes to the vision of ‘Stronger India - Stronger Japan’.”

Abe will be the chief guest at the India Center’s 10th anniversary function on the 22nd — the first appearance of Japan’s next PM in a gathering of foreigners. Abe called on Prime Minister Manmohan Singh during an unpublicized three-day private visit to India in March 2005. “It’s one of the best meetings I have ever had. What a scholarly prime minister you have,” he said of the interaction. Therefore, when Singh comes to Japan later this year or in early 2007, it could well turn out to be a landmark visit.