Shinzo Abe (21/09/1954 - 08/07/2022)
An assassin walked up to the former Prime Minister of Japan as he was delivering a speech and let off 2 shots. Mr Abe was taken to a hospital but died form his wounds there. The assassin Tetsuya Yamagami was arrested on the spot. He is allegedly an ex-Maritime Self Defence Serviceman. The shotgun used was allegedly hand made. He has been interrogated by police and so far has offered that he did not do it because of political beliefs or convictions. More news to come.
People have been messaging me for an opinion and to be honest, I don't really have one. If Shinzo Abe was not assassinated for his political beliefs, then he must have been killed over a personal beef which we cannot fathom right now. If anything, of all the Japanese politicians, he might have been the most likely to Abe assassinated for his political beliefs, in as much as he was vilified for a lot of strange things during his long tenure as Prime Minister the second time around.
The image of Shinzo Abe differs greatly from inside Japan compared to the rest of the world To the rest of the world, he was the affable yet staunch supporter of liberal democracy, who tirelessly met with many foreign leaders and kept the liberal democracies focused on their joint security. The tributes pouring in from world leaders are an indication of just how energetically he represented Japan and this notion of liberal democracies. Albanese, Turnbull, Scomo, Kevin Rudd all offered tributes, as have Jacinda Ardern, Boris Johnson, Tsai Ing-wen, and Nerandra Modi. The picture emerges of an active participant in global processes such as the G7 and G20.
In Japan, however, he's seen more as a throwback to an older style of politics. He is from a political dynasty of Liberal Democrats. His forebears were Prime Ministers, his father was a senior LDP politician, and his brother is currently a senior LDP politician as well. There is this unrelenting feel of nepotism, entitlement, and money-politics all entwined in the classic LDP manner. Perhaps this is why people sought to frame him as corrupt, but at the same time, none of the alleged scandals really turned up any real dirt. It was more image than substance, and the image was possibly couched in terms of an older politics from the days of his forebears.
The fear had always been he is government would somehow re-write the 'Peace Constitution' of Japan and turn it back into a fully militarist war mongering nation. The people who accused him of these plans never really found the evidence that he was doing such things. In the 8year 9 months in power the second time, he did no re-write the constitution. This may partly be because he seemed to spend an inordinate time defending himself from the suggestion that maybe his influence as Prime Minister might have been fraudulently mis-used by a friend of his wife to obtain public land to build some school.
The point is, he was hardly the militarist everybody feared him to be. If he ever really were one, he was all talk. Instead he went around the world shoring up the flagging fortunes of liberal democracies and kept working towards things like the Quad. As it turned out, he was decidedly a lot more interested in security than conquest. All this internationalism and concern for global security was maybe rare coming from a modern Japanese Prime Minister, but in that sense he redefined Japan's role in the world through better diplomacy.
And then he resigned. The last 2 and a half years of living through the pandemic made his presence a lot lighter, paler and less defined. Shinzo Abe ultimately embodied the best and worst aspects of politics in modern Japan. Perhaps then it is unsurprising that his demise comes from the barrel of a hand-made gun, fired by an ex-MSDF, non-political assassin (if such thing is even possible). The contradictory strangeness and preposterousness of his assassin oddly befits the complicated persona of his political life. Yet the plaudits are correct. Democracy and globalism lost a champion today.
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