His efforts to repair Japan’s economy made him popular. His main concern, though, was that Japan should assert itself in the world
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskDid he see himself that way? He liked the question. He was proud of being from Choshu, and of what his forebears had done. Of course, they had wanted to keep foreigners out; but they were also people of wide horizons, who knew that Japan had to catch up, fast. They had risked their lives to achieve it.
A sense of mission ran in the family, as politics did, so that was his natural career. Friends thought him too gentle for it, but his parents had tipped him, not his elder brother, to carry on the family concern. Once there, he found it suited him well. His first administration was a failure, lasting barely a year in 2006-07; but in his second, running from 2012 to 2020, he found his Choshu voice.
Japan, he felt, also needed to retell its history. His opening act in 2006 was to pass a law revising school textbooks to play down atrocities and give the nationalist side. In that view, as in his, his grandfather was a reformer. To the rest of the world, however, he was a war criminal, a builder of Japan’s war machine. The Americans, needing him, never tried him, but put him in jail for three years. At school, his grandson was teased by other children over that. He wanted the mockery to stop.
Besides, where apologies were concerned, he felt some were owed to Japan. Childless himself, he fervently took up the cause of parents whose children had been abducted to North Korea to teach Japanese to spies. He particularly took to heart Yokota Megumi, at 13 the youngest abductee, seized as she walked home from badminton practice. In 2002, as part of a delegation headed by Koizumi Junichiro, then prime minister, he brought five abductees back. Megumi was not one of them.
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