Japan’s leader tries to honour Abe’s legacy, while building his own

Fumio Kishida has spent years trying to emerge from the shadow of Shinzo Abe, former prime miner of Japan who was gunned down at a campaign rally July 8.
Ever since both were elected in 1993 to the Diet, as Japan’s parliament is known, Abe had been the more prominent politician. A charismatic presence, he outshone Kishida, a party stalwart who can be so stiff that a schoolgirl recently asked him about the last time he truly laughed. (His answer: whenever his beloved baseball team, the Hiroshima Toyo Carp, wins.)
After Kishida finally — on the second try — ascended to the prime miner’s office, Abe continued to niggle him from the sidelines. He floated controversial ideas, such as a proposal that Japan host U.S. nuclear weapons, and warned that financial markets might see Kishida’s economic policies as “social” and react badly to them.
Now, after the assassination, Kishida, 64, is trying to honour Abe while proving that he can set himself apart from the legacy of Japan’s longest-serving prime miner.
“A couple of years ago, Kishida was almost considered as one who had no chance to become prime miner,” said Mikitaka Masuyama, a professor of political science at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies in Tokyo. Now, he said, “we have to figure out whether Kishida really has the ability and leadership qualities to run the government and control” his Liberal Democratic Party.
The looming question for Kishida is how he will spend his political capital, bolstered a victory in elections to the Upper House of Parliament a week ago. The prime miner had already indicated that he would move to enact Abe’s most cherished goals, including a revision of the pacif clause in the constitution that renounces war, as well as an increase in defence spending.
Last week, Kishida was quick to say he would take up the “difficult issues” that Abe had “poured his passion into” but “couldn’t accomplish.” He promised to “drastically enhance Japan’s defence capabilities within five years.”
As much as Abe’s death, geopolitical circumstances will dictate Kishida’s choices. The war in Ukraine and rising military threats from China and North Korea have prompted Kishida, who had previously cast himself as a liberal-leaning, dovish member of the Liberal Democrats, to take on a more hawkish mantle.

Given the regional pressures, “raising defence spending is not optional anymore for Tokyo,” said Titli Basu, an associate fellow at the Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses in New Delhi.
Most Japanese recognize those threats: In polls, a majority backs increasing the defence budget. And although the public once vociferously opposed revising the pacif constitution, surveys in the spring indicated that a majority would now consider it.
Kishida is “saying things that in the past, whoever said it would have had political division,” said Rahm Emanuel, U.S. ambassador to Japan. “There is consensus-building that is partly to his credit and partly to events.”
In the nine months since the party chose Kishida as prime miner, he has steadily extended the unstinting diplomacy that was a hallmark of Abe’s reign.
He has also quietly differentiated himself from his predecessor.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in late February, Kishida strongly condemned Russia’s actions without hesitation and swiftly enacted sanctions. Eight years earlier, Abe, keen to foster a relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, had dragged his feet on imposing sanctions after Russia annexed Crimea.
Since October, Kishida has visited 11 countries. Last month, he became the first Japanese prime miner to attend a NATO meeting. In May, when Kishida visited Vietnam, one of a handful of countries that had voted against a United Nations resolution to suspend Russia from the Human Rights Council, he and Vietnamese Prime Miner Pham Minh Chinh agreed on the importance of an immediate cease-fire in Ukraine, and Chinh announced $500,000 in humanitarian assance to Ukraine.
Like Abe, Kishida came to politics as the son and grandson of members of parliament.
As young lawmakers who entered the Lower House in the same year, Kishida and Abe sometimes worked as a pair. Shinobu Konno, a political commentator, recently recalled on ANN News, a Japanese television network, that the two travelled to Taiwan on a diplomatic mission in 1997, with Abe as the head of the group and Kishida as his deputy.
“Mr. Kishida was a strong drinker but a boring talker,” Konno said. “And Mr. Abe was a good talker but not a strong drinker, so they divided their responsibilities. Mr. Kishida was in charge of drinking and would compete with the stronger Taiwanese drinkers, while Mr. Abe was in charge of talking and getting everyone excited.”
During Abe’s brief first stint as prime miner from 2006-07, Kishida served as state miner in charge of Okinawa and Northern Territories affairs. After Abe returned to power in 2012, he appointed his old friend as foreign miner, a post that Kishida would hold longer than anyone else in Japan’s post-World War II hory.

But when Abe resigned in 2020, he threw his weight behind another man, Yoshihide Suga, to succeed him. Suga beat Kishida a party vote of nearly 4-1.
A year later, after Suga was forced to resign and Kishida ran again for the party leadership, Abe, who led the LDP’s largest and most right-leaning faction in parliament, hand-picked a different successor. Only after Sanae Takaichi failed to get enough votes in the first round of party voting did Abe support Kishida, the eventual victor.
Kishida started out trying to dinguish himself from Abe, offering a “new capitalism” as a departure from Abe’s well-known economic platform, dubbed “Abenomics.” Kishida said he wanted to narrow income inequality and proposed raising some taxes.
He has since ratcheted back that rhetoric, and he has seemed to embrace Abe’s calls for doubling defence spending and amending the constitution.
Still, analysts see glimmers of Kishida trying to be his own man.
Giving the keynote speech last month at a security forum hosted Singapore, he noted that Germany had announced it would raise its defence budget to 2% of its annual economic output — a goal that Abe had sought for Japan. But Kishida did not cite a numerical target, instead pledging a “substantial increase.” What’s more, he said Japan would “proceed within the scope of our constitution.”
Yuki Tatsumi, director of the Japan Program at the Stimson Center in Washington, D.C., said she saw Kishida as “pushing back on some of the stuff that Abe was pushing on him in the court of public opinion.”
As recently as Thursday, Kishida, referring to defence spending, said that “we must be realic and concrete in our discussions but at the same time, not be numbers-oriented.”
Economic reality may undercut the possibility of setting drastic targets. With inflation rising, the yen depreciating, coronavirus infections increasing and, in the longer term, the population ageing and the birthrate falling, Kishida may find he doesn’t have the money to pay for all government priorities.
Japan’s traditional pace of change may be on Kishida’s side. Consensus-building is valued, and incremental progress — rather than radical transformation — is the norm.
“It has been a slow evolution over time where the increasing chipping away North Korea and China at Japanese security has increased awareness in the public and the politicians that more needs to be done,” said Jeffrey Hornung, a senior political scient at the Rand Corp. specializing in Japanese security and foreign policy. “As long as Kishida continues to go slow and steady, I do think he’ll be OK.”