Shinzo Abe’s legacy: a stagnant economy, loyalty to Donald Trump, deepening rivalries with China and the two Koreas – and the longest tenure as PM

Shinzo Abe has failed to resolve old grievances or revitalise the economy ahead of the coming population crunch. His dream of a constitutional revision is also a long shot, yet he has served longer than any PM in Japan’s history

Kevin Rafferty

Published: 6:00am, 21 Nov 2019

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Japanese media featured smiling shots of Shinzo Abe, who has just broken all records to become Japan’s longest-serving prime minister, at 2,887 days and still going strong, striding atop Japan’s political scene like a real-life colossus.

For all the celebrations of Abe’s record-breaking past, the real questions are for the future: what is Abe doing with his power and how is he preparing an ailing Japan for the challenges of an uncertain future.

If you take a simple snapshot of Japan today, life seems sweet: optimists point to great social stability, relative equality by the standards of other rich countries, continuing economic growth and high employment inside a stable system where most people feel they are middle class. It is an island of prosperous stability in a difficult world. A friend who is head of one of Japan’s big banks complained that he was earning just US$1.25 million, whereas Wall Street friends and rivals receive more than 20 times as much.

But Japan faces multiple threats. More than 126 million people today will decline to 97 million by 2050. Abe has opened the door to 345,000 foreign workers over five years. Such numbers will be hard to assimilate, yet not enough to make up for the diminishing Japanese workforce.

Where Japan’s economy should be responsive to changing times, it is set in its ways. Abe has tried to encourage key changes, such as raising wages and bringing women into executive positions, and failed. Women are mostly joining the workforce in low-paid and part-time jobs. Corporate Japan clings to its profits rather than investing in workers or cutting-edge technology.

A Vietnamese worker picks tomatoes at a tomato farm in Asahi, Chiba prefecture, Japan, in December 2018. Photo: Bloomberg

Education is too bureaucratic. Young Japanese are content to stay at home and not face foreign perils. This is a dangerous complacency when rivals all around are prowling the world hungrily.

China, most obviously, is powering ahead, creating technologies for the next century. South Korean companies are showing themselves to be more inventive than their Japanese counterparts. North Korea, meanwhile, is investing in new weapons systems that put Japan on the front line.

Potentially, the biggest threat is Japan’s lack of friends in Asia, where old rivalries and pains of decades ago are still open wounds.

Abe has not chosen foreign friends well. He has placed greatest faith in Donald Trump , but Trump barely blinked when North Korea defiantly launched new short-range missile tests, claiming they were not a threat to the US.

US President Donald Trump shakes hands with Japan's ambassador to the United States, Shinsuke Sugiyama, in front of US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer during the signing ceremony for the US-Japan Trade Agreement at the White House in Washington on October 7. Photo: Reuters

At the same time, Abe has failed to mount any charm offensive with his Asian neighbours. Relations with North Korea remain frozen over the North’s abductions of Japanese between 1977 and 1983. And Japan and South Korea are at loggerheads after Korean court rulings that Japanese companies must pay compensation for actions during colonial rule. The two countries have taken tit-for-tat measures against each other on trade and intelligence-sharing.

And Tokyo shows nervous tension as it watches the rise of China, economically and militarily.

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This is the dangerous background against which Abe is plotting to fulfil his lifetime ambition – to amend Japan’s “no-war” constitution. No matter that more than half the Japanese population is happy with the constitution as it is, he has set the legislative discussion rolling.

It will be a tough task to win the two-thirds majority in the Diet, especially if the coalition partners of Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party, the minor party Komeito, persist in opposition.

Non-LDP members of the Diet are not so much an opposition as an ever-changing kaleidoscope of bodies colliding, forming parties and instantly rushing apart. Their best hope is to have a sufficient constellation at election time to deny the LDP a two-thirds majority.

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Critics contend that immediate constitutional changes will be more symbolic than real – Japan’s so-called Self-Defence Forces are more than a match for most regular armies, superior technologically even to China, though not in terms of manpower and firepower.

Although Japan is the only victim of nuclear weapons, Abe refuses to sign the nuclear weapons ban treaty. Some politicians and intellectuals believe that it is a matter of time before Japan transfers its nuclear knowledge into weapons; others specifically advocate going nuclear, citing the increasing unreliability of Trump’s umbrella and his moth-eaten promises.

Going nuclear would be a road to madness with so many fractious neighbours with old scores to settle. Abe should reconsider his priorities and the best use of his political capital.

Kevin Rafferty has reported on Asia for 50 years, as the Asia editor of the Financial Times, founder-editor of Business Times, Malaysia, as a World Bank official and as a professor at Osaka University

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