Latest news with #AbeShinzo
NHK
08-07-2025
- Politics
- NHK
Three years after ex-PM Abe's fatal shooting
Three years have passed since former Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo was fatally shot while delivering a campaign speech in Nara City, western Japan. Many people visited the site near Yamato-Saidaiji Station on Tuesday to offer flowers and prayers. A moment of silence was observed at 11:31 a.m., the time Abe was shot. A man in his 60s from Nara City said he believes Abe wanted to carry out many more tasks, and it's truly regrettable that he died. A 44-year-old unemployed man, Yamagami Tetsuya, has been indicted in the case on charges including murder and illegal possession of weapons. Sources say Yamagami told investigators that he held a grudge against the religious group formerly known as the Unification Church, as his mother had donated considerable sums of money to the organization. He reportedly believed Abe had close ties to the group. The Nara District Court says seven pretrial procedures have taken place so far to organize key issues, with the first hearing scheduled for October 28. Sources say Yamagami is not planning to contest the murder charge. They say the trial is expected to focus on the severity of sentencing, in light of the defendant's circumstances. Adjustments are said to be underway for a ruling to be handed down around January next year.
The Diplomat
27-06-2025
- Politics
- The Diplomat
Japan's WWII Anniversary Strategy and China's Memory Politics
The historical issues in East Asia have long been a blindspot for the United States. Time to start paying attention. As Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru prepares for the 80th anniversary of Japan's surrender in World War II this August, the United States must, for the first time, fully recognize and respond to the geopolitical implications underpinning these commemorative cycles. While Washington tends to dismiss these disputes as political theater secondary to power politics, Beijing continues its decades-long campaign of systematically collecting, digitizing, and analyzing Japanese wartime records and military writings. This historical infrastructure provides insights into Tokyo's postwar defense establishment, reinforces China's broader nationalistic narrative, and expands Beijing's regional interests – yet Washington fails to recognize the full extent to which China weaponizes historical narratives in order to isolate Japan and weaken U.S. alliances and partnerships across Asia. As Tokyo's role in the Indo-Pacific evolves, Washington's assumption that Japan – constitutionally restricted from maintaining military forces and shaped by decades of antimilitarist constraints and pacifist public sentiment – is fundamentally divorced from its pre-1945 strategic tradition creates dangerous vulnerabilities for alliance management and regional strategy. These vulnerabilities demand a new strategy and vigorous diplomatic effort. Misreading History in the China-Japan Rivalry These strategic vulnerabilities have deep roots. During the 1990s, bilateral security trends between Japan and China received relatively little attention. The general absence of major bilateral disputes or direct military confrontation during this period – combined with the fact that the Japan-U.S. alliance itself has often obscured Japan's own security posture, sometimes deliberately, by serving as both a buffer and interpretive lens for regional dynamics – can partially explain this lack of analytical focus. Yet underlying Sino-Japanese pressure persisted in what Japanese analysts would later describe as a state of sustained 'low altitude flight' (teikū hikō) based on confrontation and distrust. While the late 20th century neglect was perhaps understandable, this analytical blind spot's endurance cannot be justified. This period of sustained tensions was punctuated by insufficient U.S. responses to Japan's history problems. During the 2005 textbook controversy, when China erupted in massive anti-Japanese protests over textbook revisions minimizing Japanese wartime atrocities, official U.S. attempts at intervention failed to effectively intermediate. Recurring disputes over Japanese leaders' visits to Yasukuni Shrine – which controversially honors convicted war criminals alongside Japan's war dead – exemplified the United States' diplomatic limitations. Washington, for example, could muster only tepid diplomatic 'disappointment' when Prime Minister Abe Shinzo proceeded with his own controversial visit despite high level appeals from the Obama administration in 2013. In the 'comfort women' dispute, Japan's controversial approach to its own wartime responsibility for sexual slavery in Korea remains largely unresolved. U.S. pressure for a quick diplomatic resolution – the 2015 Japan-South Korea agreement – alienated survivors and triggered diplomatic backlash that undermined the accord's implementation. These and other recurring tensions and missteps, persisting despite U.S. intervention and Japanese concessions, reveal a deeper challenge: the inability of U.S. policymakers to fully recognize the drivers of such regional strain. Washington's mismanagement culminated in its response to Abe's August 2015 statement marking Japan's 70th surrender anniversary. While Abe had publicly pledged during his April 2015 U.S. visit to uphold the 1993 Kono Statement officially apologizing to comfort women, his August assertion that future generations shouldn't be 'predestined to apologize' signaled a shift in Japan's approach. U.S. officials responded positively to Abe's statement, despite predictable regional fallout with Japan's neighbors. This diplomatic misstep undermined trilateral security coordination precisely when North Korean threats and Chinese incursions demanded it. As Ishiba prepares to navigate the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, he now inherits this decades-long challenge. Ishiba's Anniversary Strategy As early as January 2025, Ishiba recognized the 80th anniversary as a predominant challenge of his early tenure, despite fumbling and recently recovering approval ratings. He has proposed an expert panel to examine the war's origins. This approach allows him to sidestep a formal Cabinet statement and instead minimize personal association with the issue by issuing a message to the public based on the findings of this panel. Ishiba's April 2025 visit to the Philippines War Memorial revealed the uneasiness in his approach. His observation that 'they haven't forgotten' Japan's wartime actions acknowledges regional wounds that persist eight decades later. Yet his government's proposed war panel appears to analyze primarily procedural questions and policy failures – what Komeito party leader Saito Tetsuo described as examining 'why Japan plunged into a war where many died and why it couldn't be stopped' – not moral responsibility. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian, in contrast, demanded that Japan 'deeply reflect on its historical guilt' while citing Ishiba's November 2024 pledge to 'look to the future, facing history squarely.' Beijing commands this gap between acknowledging history and accepting guilt – and it will maintain this territory regardless of Tokyo's approach. What Japan has traditionally treated as diplomacy, China wields as strategy. Yet Ishiba's strategy seems to further break a pattern set by his predecessors. Prime Minister Murayama Tomiichi's 1995 statement at the 50th anniversary established a template of expressing 'deep remorse' and 'heartfelt apology' for Japan's wartime aggression – language that Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro maintained at the 60th anniversary in 2005. Ten years later, Abe's 2015 approach marked a sea change in this cycle, emphasizing instead Japan's evolving international role while attempting to curtail the cycle of apology. Ishiba's focus, in contrast, appears to be on process and examining wartime decision-making rather than addressing moral culpability, which positions him farther from Murayama's acceptance of guilt and closer to the strategic autonomy that has emerged from Japan's expanding security leadership in the Indo-Pacific under Abe's vision. Yet, importantly, behind Ishiba's mask of analytical neutrality lies a drift in Japan's grand strategy: nationalist narratives muted by procedural distance, quietly assuming Japanese leadership as U.S. power recedes – a shift that helps explain Beijing's efforts at controlling international narratives. Beijing's Memory Politics While Japan crafts new narratives of regional leadership, China has spent decades building the historical arsenal to counter them – translating, studying, and cataloging Japanese war materials that serve Beijing's strategic objectives regardless of Tokyo's diplomatic approach. For Beijing, mastering historical narratives stands equal to technological and economic dominance in securing China's rise to great power status – a strategy evidenced by the Chinese Ministry of State Security's 2021 analysis 'National Security and the Rise and Fall of Great Powers.' This document shows that China studies Japan's path from wartime collapse to postwar growth to map its own rise and navigate around avoidable pitfalls while undermining Tokyo's current position. Beijing does this not to settle scores, but to amplify its own advantages – a game Tokyo is only recently learning to play. Beijing's systematic preservation of wartime records is worth understanding because it both exemplifies China's priorities and serves its strategic intelligence needs – monitoring what officials like Senior Colonel Wu Qian, director general of the Information Office of the Ministry of National Defense, describe as the lingering 'specter of militarism' in Japan's modern defense posture. China leverages this strategy to both elevate its own great power status while creating a self-reinforcing internal narrative focused on historical justice and national resurgence. Institutionalizing China's Historical Infrastructure Marshal Xu Xiangqian's 1979 speech at the Central Military Commission symposium established an institutional mandate that defined China's historical intelligence apparatus. One of his core directives required Chinese military cadres to study foreign histories of World War II to prepare for modern warfare, explicitly linking historical analysis with strategic advantage. This high-level mandate stimulated a major research effort by Chinese military education institutions and civilian universities to translate and analyze works of Japanese strategic and military thought. From approximately 1980 to 2010, Chinese academies published over 700 translations of foreign military texts on World War II, while institutions including the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the Academy of Military Science, and the National Defense University began offering graduate degrees in military history. This translation infrastructure grants Chinese military decisionmakers what Ma Jun of the Chinese National Defense University called a 'rich knowledge of historical studies, and a strong ability to draw insights.' Meanwhile, such foundational Japanese military thought and historical documents are largely unknown and inaccessible to Japan's English-speaking allies. Further, China operationalizes its memory politics through memorial institutions, legal documentation, and strategic research, then deploys this historical knowledge through not just military training but confrontational diplomacy and coordinated public narratives. The Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall exemplifies Beijing's public approach, gradually transforming since its establishment in 1985 from memorialization into a celebration of 'national rejuvenation' under Xi Jinping. Beijing has long weaponized the facility's presence, including recently introducing new documentary evidence of Japanese atrocities, and maintains its international visibility and access to transform historical preservation into political leverage. Beijing applies the same strategic historiography to the Tokyo War Crimes Trials. Treatment of these proceedings remained largely neglected until China began entrenching its own historical interpretation of the trials. In 2011, Shanghai Jiao Tong University established a Center for the Tokyo Trial Studies, readily surpassing any similar institution in Japan or elsewhere internationally. The center collects, translates, and publishes Tribunal documents from the 1940s, making them widely available online. Most notably, during heightened tensions over Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands territorial disputes in 2016, the center launched one of the world's most comprehensive, multilingual online depositories of trial records and evidence to date. As just these few significant examples aptly demonstrate, Beijing has spent decades learning to read and weaponize Japan's strategic identity and history while Washington barely grasps how its ally thinks, much less where it's heading. Conclusion The knowledge asymmetry between the United States and China – compounded by Washington's failure to recognize Japan's own evolving grand strategy – creates three immediate vulnerabilities for U.S. strategy in Asia. First, it erodes effective alliance management when Japanese security decisions and postures are interpreted differently by U.S. and Chinese officials, creating the potential for dangerous misalignment during crises. Second, it risks undermining Japan's leadership ambitions while ceding narrative advantage to Beijing in multilateral fora where historical context shapes regional receptiveness to competing security frameworks. Third, it leaves Washington both ill-equipped to counter Chinese political offensives that strategically weaponize historical Sino-Japanese grievances and inclined to prioritize short-term alliance goals over addressing deeper historical tensions, U.S. retrenchment, or broader strategic evolutions in the region. Beijing's historical memory politics will test these vulnerabilities as Ishiba navigates the upcoming 80th anniversary of the end of World War II. While China's decades of strategic preparation provide significant advantages, Washington can still address these asymmetries through targeted policy adjustments. Most fundamentally, the United States must demonstrate sustained commitment to alliance management with Japan through both concrete actions and public statements that reassure Tokyo of Washington's staying power. Only then must the United States and Japan develop integrated intelligence capabilities to counter Beijing, creating bilateral initiatives that challenge China's monopoly on interpreting Japanese strategic thought for regional audiences while building U.S. expertise. Washington, alongside Tokyo, must anticipate and prepare for Beijing's historical offensives, developing proactive anniversary strategies and multilateral coordination mechanisms that prevent China from exploiting commemorative cycles to drive wedges between the United States and Japan. U.S. retreat increasingly drives Japan toward autonomy, if not outright isolation. Without reform, Beijing will exploit this upcoming anniversary to accelerate that drift while Washington will remain blind to what drives apart one of its most important Asian alliances.
NHK
29-05-2025
- General
- NHK
Putin meets widow of former Japanese Prime Minister Abe in Moscow
Russian President Vladimir Putin has met Abe Akie, the widow of the late Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo in Moscow. The meeting took place at the Kremlin on Thursday. It is not clear what brought Abe to the capital to meet the Russian leader. Abe touched on Putin's visit in 2016 to Yamaguchi Prefecture in western Japan for summit talks with her husband. The prefecture was the former prime minister's home constituency. She described Russia as a "very important neighbour for Japan," and said she would be happy if cultural exchanges between the two countries could develop. Putin said Russia remembers the late prime minister's contribution to the development of Russian-Japanese cooperation. He said Abe's dream was concluding a peace treaty between the two nations, and noted that the Japanese leader "pursued it earnestly." Putin added, "We made significant progress together on this path." After the meeting, Putin provided his private vehicle, the Aurus Senat limousine, to take Abe to the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. Abe met then US President-elect Donald Trump in the United States last December, shortly before he took office. She later gave a speech and said she would like to serve as a bridge with other countries.
NHK
21-05-2025
- Politics
- NHK
Japan's PM Ishiba decides to appoint Koizumi Shinjiro as new farm minister
Japan's Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru has decided to appoint Koizumi Shinjiro, the former chairperson of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party's Election Strategy Committee, to succeed Eto Taku as agriculture minister. The move came after Eto submitted his resignation to Ishiba on Wednesday morning, and it was accepted. Koizumi, 44, has been elected to the Lower House six times from Kanagawa's 11th district. He was first elected in 2009 at the age of 28, succeeding his father, former Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro. He became a Cabinet member for the first time in 2019, serving as environment minister under former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo. He was 38 at the time. He retained the same post in the administration of former Prime Minister Suga Yoshihide. Koizumi was one of the nine contenders in the LDP leadership election in September. He placed third in the first round of voting and did not advance to the runoff. But he garnered 75 votes -- the largest number -- from Diet members. Following the launch of the Ishiba administration, Koizumi was appointed chairperson of the party's Election Strategy Committee, but stepped down to take responsibility for the party's major setback in the Lower House election in October. The prime minister appears intent on restoring public confidence in his administration and continuing efforts to stabilize rice prices with the appointment of Koizumi, who has previous Cabinet experience and strong knowledge of agricultural policy.
