Contemplating Shinzo Abe's record

Abe would be leaving behind a far more confident nation than the one he was handed. — AP

THESE should have been celebratory days for Shinzo Abe.

This week, he passed 2,800 continuous days as Japan's prime minister, erasing a record set by his grand uncle, Eisaku Sato. Yet, it has been a while since he went to Yamaguchi prefecture, his bailiwick on the south-west of Japan's main island, or to his vacation home in Yamanashi prefecture, north of Mt Fuji.

Neither has he been golfing. Instead, he is said to have gone 150 days without a break as he swivelled to confront the pandemic after what seemed a slow and uncertain start.

Even for the hardworking Japanese, this is a bit of a stretch and the strains are showing. Abe has been in and out of hospital lately. In the past few weeks he has mostly been at home, showing up in the office only in the afternoons. One news report even had him once vomiting blood in his office. This is one exhausted man.

"Politics is not about how many days one has stayed in office, but what one has accomplished," Abe told reporters after his second hospital visit. "I have fully devoted myself every day to realising the pledges I have made to the people."

At 65, which is Abe's age, you don't normally call time on a political leader's career. Joe Biden is 77 and he wants to be president of the United States while Donald Trump, at 74, wants to stay on in that office.

Xi Jinping is 67 and said to be eyeing the title of chairman, which would allow him to preside over China for the rest of his life. Abe's good friend, Indian premier Narendra Modi, is 69 and just into his second term and clearly eyeing a third straight five-year innings to draw level with the record of founding prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru.

But on Friday (August 28), Abe resigned over health reasons, apologising for leaving in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic and regretting he would be unable to complete his duties.

Setbacks and silver linings

With Abe’s departure, it is time to look both at his nine years in office over two stints and beyond it.

To start with, this whimper of a denouement clearly isn't what he had in mind as he vigorously went about planning to host the 2020 Summer Olympic Games, now postponed to next year thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic. The Olympics, intended to showcase a resurgent nation, were to have been his swansong and the inevitable delay after the virus outbreak, a crushing disappointment, therefore.

Furthermore, Covid-19 has dented the Japanese economy, which had already been slowing after a consumption tax increase. Now, the wipeout in foreign arrivals is adding to a variety of other uncertainties that led it to shrink nearly 8% from the previous quarter in the three months that ended in June, an unprecedented contraction.

Hosting China's President Xi for a bilateral meeting was also big on his 2020 calendar but again not to be.

And it does not look like amending Article 9 of Japan's postwar Constitution, a key item on his agenda that he saw necessary for Japan to be a "normal" state with a fully functioning military, will come to pass on his watch.

Yet, even as he endures these disappointments, there are the silver linings.

Overseas visitors may have disappeared but domestic tourism, which accounts for more than three-quarters of travellers in normal times, has been fairly resilient. Six of 10 departures by the big carriers JAL and ANA are to a domestic destination. For all the perception of a nation desperate for international markets to make a good living, the home economy is of significant enough size to stem a wider rout.

Likewise, the feared deflationary trap hasn't materialised. Indeed, the targeted 2% inflation may yet come about because of the vast amount of money flowing into Japan's economy, achieving what years of loose monetary policy failed to do, according to Hideo Hayakawa, the former top economist at the Bank of Japan.

So, too, with China. Behind the surface disappointment of the cancelled summit, Abe probably allows himself a measure of self-satisfaction that he is now pretty much in the driving seat of that relationship.

Indeed, foreign policy is one area where Abe could be said to have scored well. Trump's rise to the presidency clearly caught Japan off guard, as it did so many other nations.

However, Abe responded swiftly, showing up in New York's Trump Tower to see the president-elect and building what seems a trusting relationship with the mercurial American leader.

Today, Tokyo credits itself with Washington's sturdy embrace of the Free and Open Indo-Pacific concept and the importance of South-east Asia in the wider Asia policy.

Abe and Trump have met nearly a dozen times, spoken on the phone at least 30 times and golfed together on four occasions, according to some counts. The phone conversations, if not golf, were far fewer with Trump's predecessor, Barack Obama.

Trump's decision to tear up US participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership on his first day in office was no doubt a disappointment but Abe countered by leading the push to build a Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), minus the US.

Alarmed at seeing nations such as Australia push agricultural and industrial products into Japan on preferential terms thanks to CPTPP, Trump then rushed to stitch up his own bilateral trade agreement with Tokyo to gain almost matching benefits.

In April last year when it still wasn't clear how low US-China ties would go, Abe, seeking some room to hedge, had sent Toshihiro Nakai, the No. 2 figure in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), to Beijing. His mission was to deliver a conciliatory letter to Xi along with promises of strengthening cooperation.

Since then US-China ties have nosedived and with the relentless pressure applied on Beijing by Trump and Beijing's stock falling in many global capitals, it was Xi who needed a grand welcome in Tokyo. Abe kept Xi guessing about his intentions. Last November, the "Alliance to Safeguard the Dignity and Interests of Japan" formed by the ruling LDP adopted a resolution to urge the Japanese PM to not invite Xi to visit Japan, if China continued the crackdown and suppression in Hong Kong. It was not lost on the discerning that Abe happens to be the LDP chief as well.

A more confident nation

What is clear is that Abe would be leaving behind a far more confident nation than the one he was handed, one that no longer feels the need to apologise pathetically for its wartime actions.

This year, while Abe sent ritual offerings to Yasukuni Shrine for the war dead, he stayed away from a personal visit, as he has for the past few years. But at least two Cabinet ministers paid their respects in person, including Environment Minister Shinjiro Koizumi, 39, who is often mentioned as a future premier.

Japan's Self-Defence Forces are now allowed to deploy overseas after a controversial reinterpretation of the Constitution – which means they can come to the aid of friendly nations such as the US, Australia and India, militaries with which the Japanese regularly conduct wargames.

Under Abe's watch, the Japanese navy has been sailing farther and farther outward. In April 2016, after Vietnam opened an international port in Cam Ranh Bay, Japanese guided missile destroyers made a port call - ahead of even the US Navy. In October 2018, a Japanese helicopter carrier – the largest vessel in its navy – sailed all the way to Sri Lanka, stopping in Singapore on the return journey, without any eyebrows being raised.

At the beginning of his term, key officials spoke of plans to build a defence-industrial complex that will feed back into the economy. But those plans have had mixed results; New Delhi has grounded plans to buy and build US-2 amphibious aircraft from Japan and Australia chose the French firm DCNS for 12 nuclear-powered attack submarines it is acquiring. Although Japan's Soryu subs were reckoned to be the superior vessels, Abe seemed reluctant to use government muscle to push the case, secretly gladdening sections of his security establishment that were never too thrilled to share their high tech vessel's secrets.

There is, of course, the feeling that Abe was just too focused on cultivating Trump. With the exception of India's Modi, with whom he seems to share a strong personal chemistry, he does not seem to have strong bonds with too many leaders in the region.

Beijing treated him more like a nuisance until it became very obvious to Chinese rulers that Abe had succeeded in gaining Trump's ear. For this reason, his last trip to Beijing went markedly well.

Asian journalists have reason to chafe that Abe has not been available to them for interviews in the same manner that he grants access to American journalists.

Waiting in the wings

It will take a decade or two perhaps to get the full measure of Abe and his impact on Japan. The heights he achieved or the lows he suffered - with the Koreas for instance - will in some ways be determined by how tall his successors in office get to be.

Party influentials will probably see it in their interest to not project someone who could potentially override or ignore them, so the prospects for now are for a less assertive successor emerging.

Taro Aso, his gaffe-prone Deputy Prime Minister who once urged older Japanese to "hurry up and die", and Yoshihide Suga, the Chief Cabinet Secretary, are into their 70s. That could narrow the field to the former and current defence ministers, Shigeru Ishiba and Taro Kono, respectively.

Abe once vowed to use his final term to hand over a "proud and hope-filled Japan" to future generations. Surveys would indicate that most Japanese are satisfied with their lives, even if the dwindling birth rate could be said to suggest they are less enthusiastic about their futures.

Autumn typically arrives in Japan in mid-September. Too bad for the political career of Japan's reigning patriarch that it seems to have arrived a tad early for him. — The Straits Times/ANN

Ravi Velloor is Associate Editor at The Straits Times, a member of the Asia News Network (ANN), an alliance of 24 news media entities. The Asian Editors Circle is a series of commentaries by editors and contributors of ANN.