The Complicated Legacy of Shinzo Abe
On the sunny morning of July 8th, 2022, two gunshots echoed across the street in front of Yamato-Saidaiji Station in the city of Nara, Japan. Former prime minister Shinzo Abe had just been shot by a man wielding a handmade shotgun while delivering a speech in support of a fellow party member. As he was rushed to the hospital via helicopter, the breaking news of the shooting shocked Japan and the rest of the world. In a country where gun ownership, let alone gun violence, is extremely rare, no one could have seen this coming.
Abe was in “critical condition,” the doctors said. Hours passed with his fate left unclear, but everyone had their own unspoken premonitions. Alas, at 5 PM, it was finally announced that he was dead.
There was an outpour of grief in Japan, and many international leaders sent their condolences. During his nine years in office, Abe had presented himself as an active diplomat, making an unprecedented number of visits to other countries and playing a key role in establishing stronger economic ties with numerous nations. He is even credited for forming the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), a trade deal between 11 countries including Australia, Canada and Singapore. He was a flagbearer of 21st-century globalization. Thus, it came of no surprise that prominent comments on Abe’s legacy were quite positive, to say the least:
“...a champion of the Alliance between our nations and the friendship between our people [...] even at the moment he was attacked, he was engaged in the work of democracy.” — Joe Biden
“The world has lost a great man of vision…” — Justin Trudeau
“...a firm believer that no economy, society, or country can achieve its full potential if women are left behind […] a loss for Japan and our world.” — Hillary Clinton
However, these comments do not address the controversies that lie beneath his many accomplishments. As of writing this article on August 15th, 2022, the 77th anniversary of Korean independence from Japan, there are 11 living women in South Korea who would not only disagree with, but fervently condemn that last statement: the last surviving comfort women.
Abe’s legacy is stained by his record of historical negationism (the act of distorting history) in denying the heinous crimes of Imperial Japan to fit a nationalistic agenda. Back in 2007, Abe claimed that there was “no evidence” that Japan forced women to work as sex slaves, a blatant historical falsehood. During and after his term, he visited the controversial Yasukuni Shrine, notorious for enshrining more than a thousand war criminals, multiple times to pay his respects. Furthermore, he was a special advisor to Nippon Kaigi, an ultra-conservative, far-right lobbying group that denies that the Nanking Massacre ever happened and asserts that the comfort women were never forced. Abe also oversaw the removal of all mentions or depictions of comfort women from Japanese high school textbooks. The list goes on.
This negationist attitude differed starkly from his predecessors’, the majority of whom had repeatedly apologized for the country’s historical crimes. For instance, in 2001, then-PM Junichiro Koizumi expressed remorse over the comfort women’s “immeasurable and painful experiences.” He added that Japan should “face up squarely to its past history and accurately convey it to future generations,” something Abe clearly failed to do.
Despite his misdeeds, I still view the assassination as unwarranted and immoral, and frown upon open mockery of his death as was seen in China (his relationship with Taiwan also played a factor). Nonetheless, I believe that it is important to correct one-sided perspectives of his legacy. So how will Shinzo Abe be remembered in the years to come? A visionary who improved Japan’s political and economic relations with the rest of the world? Or a nationalist who strained the country’s ties with its former colonies by denying a painful history? Perhaps both portrayals are true. But the latter grows increasingly relevant as the number of people who have directly lived through and can speak of that pain dwindle.
Read more about Korean comfort women and support the ongoing fight to uphold the truth:
http://www.nanum.org/eng/main/index.php
https://womenandwar.net/kr/about-us/