Word: ldp
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...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...
...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 the LDP the balance of power is moving to the right...
...Will Abe tinker with Japan's constitution, and allow greater leeway for the country's Self-Defense Forces (SDF) to act abroad? "I'd like to draft a new constitution with my own hands," he told an LDP convention on Sept. 1, when he declared his candidacy for party president. He won't get the chance to do that; but Abe will almost certainly reinterpret the constitution in a way that allows the military to engage in collective self-defense actions with allies, a move Koizumi?no softie on defense?never pulled off, even while he dispatched Japanese forces...
...from that, to be a populist on foreign policy," says Steven Vogel, an associated professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. In today's charged Japanese political atmosphere, that could be dangerous. Few politicians know that better than Koichi Kato, a former secretary-general of the LDP. Once a close ally of Koizumi, Kato had become vocal in his criticism of the Prime Minister's trips to Yasukuni. On Aug. 15, the day Koizumi made his latest visit to the shrine, a right-wing activist allegedly set fire to Kato's family house in the legislator...
...stance on foreign affairs that is responsible for such heat as the LDP race has generated. But Japanese voters care more about their pocketbooks than they do about Yasukuni. The recovering economy is about to record its longest expansion of the postwar era, but poll after poll shows ordinary Japanese are concerned about a growing income disparity that threatens to divide the country into haves and have-nots. Abe's policies to address the issue are vague, amounting to little more than a plan to provide financial aid for failed entrepreneurs to start up new businesses, or help the long...