Shinzo Abe as Japan’s longest-serving PM; here’s why his tenure is unique
Along with being at the forefront of domestic political controversy surrounding reports of cronyism last year that threatened his prime ministership, Abe has also had to deal with worsening relations with neighbour South Korea. However, Abe has managed to survive it all.
On November 20, Shinzo Abe will become the longest-serving Japanese Prime Minister in history.
Since he took office for the second term in December 2012, Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has had a tumultuous tenure. Along with being at the forefront of domestic political controversy surrounding reports of cronyism last year that threatened his prime ministership, Abe has also had to deal with worsening relations with neighbour South Korea. However, Abe has managed to survive it all. On November 20, he will become the longest-serving Japanese Prime Minister in history.
Why is Shinzo Abe’s leadership unique?
In the last three decades, since the reign of former Emperor Akihito began in 1989, Japan has had 17 Prime Ministers. Abe himself has served twice — the first tenure lasted from 2006 to 2007 and the present one started in 2012. Abe’s second stint as prime minister brought some much-needed stability and respite to the constantly changing top leadership of the country. Most of Abe’s predecessors had been in office for only a year or less.
Abe’s economic policies, also called ‘Abenomics’, that helped him get elected again in 2012 and his hardline stance regarding Japan’s revisionist history, particularly the country’s colonial history, has led to many observers describing him as a right-wing nationalist leader.
In May 2017, Abe set a deadline of 2020 by which he aimed to revise Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution, a goal that the prime minister has struggled to achieve.
What is Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution?
Following the end of the Second World War, Japan’s Constitution came into effect on May 3, 1947. At the behest of the United States, a clause in the Japanese Constitution forbade the country from maintaining an army, navy or air force. Article 9 of Japan’s Constitution stipulates that “the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation”.
However, the country does have the Self-Defense Forces that has one of the largest defence budgets in the world and in fact, according to some observers, operates as a military force. According to some researchers focusing on Japan, one interpretation of the Japanese Constitution is that it disallows any military force, even for self-defense purposes. Some researchers and the government believe the opposite.
After the Self-Defense Forces were established in 1954, the Japanese government began pushing the view that self-defense is an inherent right of sovereign states that Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution does not specifically mention. The Japanese government says the presence of the SDF does not violate the Constitution. Due to the clauses of the Constitution, according to the Japanese government, the country does not possess intercontinental ballistic missiles and other similar weapons.
In July 2014, Abe circumvented Japanese laws and approved a reinterpretation of Article 9 of the Constitution to give more powers to the Self-Defense Forces, with the approval of the US, to the consternation of its neighbours, South Korea, North Korea and China. Even within Japan, this move by Abe was deemed unconstitutional by some citizens and politicians who believed he had deliberately circumvented constitutional amendment procedures.
Abe and the political party that he belongs to, the Liberal Democratic Party, have wanted a full revision of Article 9 and have stated that the proposed revisions would permanently settle existing debates about the status of the SDF.
What is behind Abe’s stance of historical revisionism?
Abe’s consistent historical revisionism—the reinvention of historically recorded occurrences—particularly with regard to Japan’s colonial history has caused him to be a controversial figure in world politics, particularly with regard to Japan-South Korea relations. Both countries have had a contentious relationship, and over the past few years, diplomatic relations between the two have worsened and impacted trade and diplomatic relations. Both countries have been unable to resolve their disputes with regard to the Second World War. A reason for this stalemate may be Abe’s own political leanings and his controversial family history, along with his ancestors’ involvement in the Japanese military forces that occupied territories in the Asia-Pacific. Researchers consider Abe to be a right-wing nationalist leader and according to a BBC news report in 2012, prior to Abe’s appointment as Prime Minister, he was “more right wing than most of his predecessors.”
Of the many cases involving historical revisionism, Abe has consistently denied that the Japanese military subjected women, often referred to as “comfort women”, in North and South Korea, China and in other Asian countries to sexual slavery and abuse during the country’s colonial rule. Abe has dismissed South Korea’s accusations of sexual war crimes committed by Japanese soldiers during colonial rule and implied that the Japanese military did not use force or coercion—a stance that South Korea entirely rejects.
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