Today, Explained - Shinzo Abe’s call to arms

Episode Date: July 14, 2022

The assassination of former prime minister Shinzo Abe may have given his agenda to militarize Japan new life. Abe biographer Tobias Harris explains. This episode was produced by Haleema Shah, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard with help from Victoria Dominguez, engineered by Paul Mounsey, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

One week ago, the most influential Japanese politician since maybe Emperor Hirohito was assassinated. Tonight, the assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe shocked not just Japan, but the world. Shinzo Abe was killed while campaigning for his LDP, the Liberal Democratic Party, which days later gained a supermajority in the Japanese parliament. Prime Minister Fumio Kishida pledged to continue working on Abe's legacy. I'll work on challenges that Abe could not solve on his own. The election win could be key in realizing Abe's ultimate vision for Japan. He wanted to make the Japanese state better defending itself. He wanted to build a proper

national security establishment. He wanted to lift the restrictions on what the Japanese state better defending itself. He wanted to build a proper national security establishment. He wanted to lift the restrictions on what the Japanese military could do, both just to defend Japan, but then also to work in collaboration with the United States and with other countries. Shinzo Abe's call to arms, coming up on Today Explained. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. Today Explained, Sean Ramos Firm with Tobias Harris. Author of The Iconoclast, Shinzo Abe, and The New Japan, which is the only English-language biography of the late Prime Minister.

Tobias is still in a bit of a state. Shock that I think I'm still working through, to be honest. The whole thing's extra shocking because Japan. Japan has some of the strictest gun control laws in the world. Unlike some countries, not a ton of guns. The suspect was quickly apprehended. Police say he used a homemade gun. And a little ironic if we're being real because Shinzo Abe's whole thing was beefing up Japan's military autonomy,

which it lost after World War II. This hawkish former prime minister who wanted to militarize a conflict-averse country shot dead with a homemade gun by a former Japanese soldier. On the show today, we're going to try and understand why Shinzo Abe was so gung-ho on re-militarizing Japan and whether his death could ultimately secure his vision. What is becoming clear and what really has become clear in the last few days is just how monumental and towering a figure he was in Japanese politics and around the world. Tobias is our guide. Globally, you know, he was an extremely activist prime minister, traveled the world 80-something trips over the course of his second premiership, constantly meeting with world leaders, constantly trying to raise Japan's profile on the world stage.

It's an honor to have my friend, Prime Minister Abe, Japan. We have many things to discuss. And the tributes that came in from around the world immediately after his death are just, I mean, just is a measure of just how big his footprint was globally. India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi said he was shocked and saddened beyond words. India has declared one day of national mourning for Abe on the 9th of July as a mark of respect for the fallen statesman. No Japanese leader has matched, maybe ever, certainly not in a long time. What's his backstory? How did he come to power?

With Abe, you have to start with his family. Both of his grandfathers were in politics. His maternal grandfather, Kishi Nobusuke, is the one who's certainly more famous. He was a member of Tojo's wartime cabinet, including the cabinet that declared war on the United States, wound up imprisoned as a suspected war criminal after the war, was not tried, returned to politics in the 1950s, became prime minister again. I mean, just this, you know, really fascinating figure whose career spanned a lot of years.

18 years after Pearl Harbor, Premier Kishi, a one-time war criminal, links his country's future more closely with the United States. And he really bequeathed to his grandson this vision of removing these post-war restrictions, helping Japan reclaim its rightful place in the sun, so to speak. Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister of Japan. He very much got that from his grandfather. In 1957, Nobusuke Kishi, my grandfather, standing right here, began his address by saying,立ち上がっていると言うことです 私たちの強い信仰のために

日本は自由な国々と自分自身を 組み合わせることができると言っています Japan associates herself with the free nations of the world. But his father, Shintaro, was also a really important political figure in his own right. Faction leader in the 1980s, long-time foreign minister who Abe actually worked as a private secretary to during those years. And so he kind of traveled the world and saw from his father how to succeed in personal diplomacy. And then also tragically died young just before really he was due to become prime minister. And so Abe enters politics two years after his father's death, inherits a seat and is kind of helped along, is sort of sped along in his career because his father, you know, had so many people who were loyal to him and then wanted to

pay favors to his son. And so Abe ended up speeding through a lot of kind of checkpoints and ends up becoming prime minister only 13 years after entering politics, which is very unusual. Yeah. And he admitted himself that he was not ready for it, that he hadn't had enough seasoning. He hadn't done enough of the jobs that would have prepared him to be prime minister. And his first premiership is just an absolute mess. I mean, it just, you know, he relied on bad advisors. His judgment wasn't good. I mean, he just, one thing after another, ends up leading the LDP to a big electoral defeat. Unthinkably irresponsible, a dereliction of power, government surrendered.

All phrases used in the Japanese press after the surprise resignation of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. In 2007, it looks like his career is over. Resigns, also happened to, you know, be suffering from an attack of his chronic digestive ailment. And yet somehow, over the next couple of years, returns to political activity, once again becomes sort of the leading conservative, reinvents himself as someone who had an economic plan for Japan. And by 2012, is back at the top of the LDP,

becomes prime minister again, and really has an opportunity to put his vision for a new Japan forward. And what is that vision? The vision really is, to a great extent, what he inherited from his grandfather, this belief that post-war institutions, the constitution that the U.S. introduced during the occupation years, because of those institutions, Japan had been constrained from defending itself, from playing a fully active role in the world as a great power, from being a regional leader, from being a global leader on a number of different issues.

And some of it was institutional, that he felt that the Japanese government, kind of pre-1993, power was too diffuse. You didn't have a strong executive. You didn't have a prime minister who could say, this is what I'm going to do, and then actually be able to follow through on it. Power was, there were way too many veto players. So part of it was just centralizing power, concentrating power in the hands of the prime minister. Some of it was just building new institutions that

would enable the prime minister to make foreign security policy as never before. And some of it was strengthening Japan's economy and finding a new growth model and finding a way out of long-term economic stagnation. By 2012, he had fixed that. He had a solid group of economic policy advisors and had a clearer sense that there was no way to talk about a stronger Japan. Japan is a great power again, you know, in the first rank of nations, if Japan hadn't fixed its economic problems. So that was sort of the complete vision. Was that vision controversial in Japan? There were certainly parts of it. You know, for many Japanese, they look at what Abe called the

post-war regime, not as something to be embarrassed about or something shameful or something that prevented Japan from realizing some better version of itself. I mean, for a lot of Japanese, particularly those who came of age during the war and immediately afterwards, they saw the institutions, the post-war institutions, as something that created a prosperous, peaceful, egalitarian society. They saw them as something genuinely good and worth defending. They saw the constitution that, yes, may have been introduced by U.S. occupation authorities, but even so, I mean, it became something Japanese people became attached to as something that made Japan unique, that made Japan special in the world. You know, that we have Article 9, you know, we have decided that, you know, war is not, you know, as the text of the Constitution says, that war will not be an

instrument of national policy, that this was something that set Japan apart and was worth defending. And so it was very controversial. I mean, pushing, you know, saying that these institutions were outmoded, or they were shameful, or they were something that prevented Japan from being its best self. That was not something that a lot of people agreed with. But now that he's dead, this dream, this vision of his is the closest it's ever been to being realized

in modern Japanese history? Well, in many respects, it has been realized. You really did have reforms that really changed how the Japanese government worked. I mean, you now have a much stronger prime minister's office, a stronger cabinet. The national security reforms maybe are a little more controversial, but those two, the changes that he introduced and that other prime ministers in the last couple of decades have introduced are also here to stay. I mean, you know, there's an acceptance that even if just to defend Japan, the military needs to be more capable, there just

doesn't seem to be a lot of controversy around that. There might be more controversy, you know, if there were questions about Japan sending troops overseas to fight wars overseas, but that seems less of an issue now. And it's much more about given the threats in its immediate vicinity, what does Japan have to do to defend itself? And also, how does it work more closely with the United States, Australia and other countries to meet the security challenges in East Asia? More with Tobias in a minute on Today Explained. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family, and Aura says it's never been easier thanks to their digital picture frames. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share

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with iGaming Ontario. With a blinding flash, Ben with Tobias Harris. We've been talking about how Shinzo Abe wanted nothing more than to upend Japan's post-war structure. Tobias is going to remind us how that structure was put in place. So Japan is defeated in 1945. The total casualties were approximately 194,000. Accurate figures are unknown and difficult to obtain

because of the- And the United States military arrives and establishes a occupation led by Douglas MacArthur. Let us pray that peace be now restored to the world and that God will preserve it always. Working under MacArthur were a number of young Americans, most of them not specialists in Japan, who really set about undertaking pretty sweeping changes to how Japan's government and society function. As members of America's historic 7th Regiment of the 1st Cavalry Division enter Tokyo,

with the precision of a well-oiled machine, the occupation rolls into the city. You know, starting with the Constitution and really strengthening Japanese democracy, breaking up some of the industrial combinations that Americans believed contributed to the war, disarming the country, demilitarization and democratization were the watchwords at that time. And where it gets complicated, and I think,

in many ways, this is really the root of the long-term political conflict that Abe, when he enters politics, really is determined to resolve in his side's favor, is so for the first couple of years of the occupation, you have these liberalizing reforms introduced actually by veterans of the New Deal in the United States. But then as the Cold War really begins to heat up, so to speak, the United States government starts looking at the world and seeing, well, a Japan that is fully disarmed,

de-industrialized, that is essentially taken out of international politics, if we don't fix its economy, the communists are going to take advantage of that. The new agreement is a key factor in the defense of the Far East against the growing might of Red China. And so the Truman administration recognized that actually we're better off having Japan as an ally and rebuilding Japan as an ally. And what that meant in practice was that the liberalizing reform basically stopped. Some of the conservative politicians, businessmen, wartime leaders who were basically imprisoned and being tried as war criminals ended up being released and making their way back into

politics. And so you ended up this incomplete transformation. And as a result of that, you have this fundamental conflict about what is post-war Japan? Is it this democratized, liberalizing place, or is it this place dominated by these old guard conservatives who would prefer an alliance to the United States, but also would want Japan to resume the business of being a great power as soon as possible. And you end up with these situations where you do have restraints, you know, the Constitution goes unchanged. But by 1954, Japan has self-defense forces again, and of course, is hosting large numbers of U.S. forces. A very modern military force, some of the

most advanced hardware in the world. This is Japan's self-defense force, strictly limited in how and where it can operate. And despite the uniforms, these are technically civilians. This reality is controversial among the left, controversial among some elements of the right. But then you have this large mainstream consensus that this is okay, that Japan not being a full-fledged great power, and that in the meantime, Japan would focus on economic growth, reconstruction, recovery, and that was the status quo for basically the duration of the Cold War. What do Japan's defense capabilities look like from the 1950s to present day?

The best term used to describe Japan during this period is anti-militarist. Because of the Japanese constitution, we are not allowed to participate in peace enforcement activities. It has armed forces, but they are not terribly sophisticated. They have equipment, of course,

lots of it bought from the United States, but the different surfaces are disjointed. sophisticated. They have equipment, of course, lots of it bought from the United States, but you know the different surfaces are disjointed, they're just sort of scattered across the archipelago. There's a strong, strong emphasis on civilian control and what that means in practice is that there's essentially this very thick layer of civilian bureaucracy separating politicians from the military. So the military almost has very little interaction with political leadership. You know, you don't, you would, you really would not even think of the prime minister as commander in chief in the sense that we would think of a U.S. president as commander in chief or even the Japanese prime minister now in some ways as commander in chief of the self-defense forces.

You had, I mean, just taboos around the military. Self-defense forces personnel when they were off base would not wear their uniforms because people would yell at them and spit at them and the term that was popular was calling them tax thieves. Wow. I mean there was a really thorough revulsion of the idea of military power. And so, you know, I think there was an acceptance of the fact that, okay, self-defense forces exist, but people didn't like it. And how has that changed in recent years? enter politics in the early 90s. I mean, you know, a lot of those taboos have eroded. And some of it is, you know, because the public has come to appreciate the self-defense forces for other reasons. The self-defense forces are really capable at disaster relief and recovery. I mean, not surprisingly, given Japan's propensity for earthquakes. And so they've, you know, they've

been present in some of the big disasters the last few decades. And I think that really has helped enhance their reputation. But there's also, I think, a realism among the Japanese public that maybe even during the Cold War was not there, where Japanese have looked at North Korea's missiles and nuclear arsenal and, you know, are cognizant of the threat that that poses. You know, they've, of course, more recently watched the rise of China and watched China's military power and are very aware of that. And I think the last and maybe other part of it is generational change. You know, I think for Japanese who grew up during the war, grew up immediately after the war,

you know, that's a very visceral feeling about what war brings to a country and not wanting to see that again. Of course, Japan should have a military rather than a self-defense force. They should be able to fight with full capacity to defend us and be as strong as armies in other nations. Younger Japanese do not have that visceral disgust at the idea of military power, at the idea that Japan should have the capabilities of defending itself from threats in its neighborhood. And that's a big change.

And I think there's every sign that that's going to continue to be a permissive condition in the future for efforts to expand Japan's role defending itself and also just in regional security more broadly. How is Japanese remilitarization viewed outside Japan in the region? It depends on where you look in the region. You think in Southeast Asia, Japan has been a partner for a number of countries that have territorial disputes with China and the South China Sea, has been quietly engaged in capacity building, providing them with equipment, particularly with Coast Guard equipment. So generally benignly, and in fact, welcome. And the fact that you're now seeing maritime self-defense forces, warships passing through the South China Sea more, I think it's welcomed. I think certainly Taiwan would welcome a more capable Japan that was more explicitly committed to come to Taiwan's aid. You know, of course, then you get to Northeast Asia and the picture gets a lot cloudier.

You know, South Koreans, there have been polls in recent years that show that South Koreans view Japan as one of the major military threats that South Korea faces. China, you know, of course, is going to look at changes to Japan's defense policy, changes to the equipment it's acquiring and will accuse Japan of arms racing. But really, what's shocking, of course, is how long it's taken Japan really to enter the arms race that's already going on in the region. So it's clearly a question of when and not if. So when this dream of Shinzo Abe, you know, to fully militarize Japan is realized, will that end up being his most prominent legacy? I think you can make that argument, but even bigger than that. I mean, I think just given

how much his efforts changed how the Japanese government works, and that you have a Japanese government that is just able to respond to crises, conduct foreign policy, basically formulate a national security policy in a much more coherent way, and then actually execute it, that ultimately is going to be even bigger. That you have a Japanese government that looks out at the world in a more strategic way than it used to, is determined to play a leadership role in ways that it could not in the past. That ultimately, I think, is going to be the legacy. And the fact that Abe, after his death, received as many tributes from world leaders as he did, and President Biden ordering flags flown at half-mast to honor Abe.

That's an extraordinary tribute to the ways in which he changed how Japan acts in the world. Tobias Harris, he's a senior fellow for Asia at the Center for American Progress, and he's the author of The Iconoclast, Shinzo Abe, and The New Japan. Which is the only English language biography of the late prime minister. Our program today was produced by Halima Shah, edited by Matthew Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and engineered by Paul Mounsey. The rest of the Today Explained team includes my co-host,

Noel King, Abhishek Artsy, Hadi Mawagdi, Miles Bryan, Victoria Chamberlain, and Afim, the Dream Shapiro. We had extra help this week from John Ahrens. Our audio fellow is Tori Dominguez. Our supervising producer is Amina Alsadi, Thank you. part of the Box Media Podcast Network. Thank you.