Word: kishi
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...pressing for attention in today's headlines. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, the country's first leader born after World War II, has announced his intention to revise Japan's pacifist postwar constitution, and he recently elevated its Defense Agency to full cabinet-ministry status. Abe's grandfather Nobusuke Kishi had been a top official in Japan's wartime government (as well as a prominent postwar Prime Minister), and Abe himself has, in the past, fudged the issue of his country's responsibility for the Pacific war. Just how open that question remains in Japan was underscored last year...
...thought to be even more unrepentant than Koizumi on the issue. Yet he recently told the Diet that his government accepted previous official Japanese apologies for the country's aggression in World War II. He also acknowledged the responsibility of Japan's wartime leaders?including his own grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, a cabinet minister during the war who later served as Prime Minister. While parts of his conservative base publicly wondered what had happened to their hawkish prince, Abe's adjustments paved the way for his East Asian summits and offered reassurance that, unlike Koizumi, he won't let ideology...
...This much is known about Abe. He is a born conservative?literally. As the grandson of Nobusuke Kishi and the grandnephew of Eisaku Sato?two of postwar Japan's most powerful and conservative Prime Ministers?Abe always knew which side he was on. Katsuei Hirasawa, now an LDP Diet member, tutored a young Abe for two years, and he recalls taking the primary-school student to his dorm at the University of Tokyo, at the heart of Japan's 1960s political tumult. "He would be right in the middle of pacifist, anti-Sato protests," Hirasawa recalls. "He wasn't angry...
...grandfather Kishi, too, had been the target of angry protests in 1960, for tying the Japanese military closer to that of the U.S. That's work that Abe, who has made the Japan-U.S. alliance the cornerstone of his foreign policy, will carry on. "Abe's beliefs and values are similar to Kishi's," says Hirasawa. "He's inherited his grandfather's political DNA." But Abe is operating in an environment where the political opposition to his views has greatly diminished. "The fact that the left has fallen out of Japanese politics is important," says Calder. "Inside...