Word: postwar
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...What a comedown for a man who drew leadership inspiration from his grand-father, a staunch nationalist who bounced back from imprisonment as a war criminal to become Premier in the 1950s. The youngest Prime Minister in postwar Japanese history, Abe came to power last September as the architect of a self-proclaimed "assertive diplomacy" in which a re-energized nation would claim its rightful place on the global stage. The 52-year-old vowed to repair relations with Asian neighbors still wounded by Japan's wartime aggression and aimed to transform the nation's military from a limited self...
...political deathwatch on Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe began minutes after his ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) suffered a historic defeat in elections at the end of July, leaving the opposition in charge of the legislature's upper house for the first time in Japan's postwar history. Abe resisted immediate calls for his resignation and seemed ready to battle for his job in the face of public antipathy. But on Sept. 12 the "fighting politician," as Abe liked to call himself, suddenly lost his stomach for the fight and submitted his resignation to a shocked Japan. "The people need...
...less than a year ago that a newly elected Prime Minister Shinzo Abe - the son of a Foreign Minister and the grandson of a Prime Minister - opened the Japanese legislature, the Diet, with an ambitious call to remake the country's postwar system, to create what he termed "a beautiful Japan." His vision was of an influential and energetic Japan, one that would not be bound by the pacifism that he believed had been forced on the Japanese in the wake of World War II, a nation whose presence on the geopolitical stage would finally match its economic muscle...
...biggest loser is likely to be the LDP itself, the party that has dominated Japan for nearly the entire postwar era. Though it holds, along with coalition partners, a two-thirds majority in the Diet's Lower House, and new elections aren't scheduled until Sept. 2009, sagging public support means that the next Prime Minister will almost certainly be forced to call early polls. Barring a new leader who can engineer a miracle turnaround - something none of the well-worn LDP candidates seem capable of - the party could well be tossed out of government altogether. "Abe has thrown...
More broadly, Abe's resignation spells the end of an attempt among more conservative members of the LDP to loosen the bounds of postwar pacifism and forge a true military alliance with the U.S. That change gathered momentum under Abe's popular predecessor, Junichiro Koizumi, who committed Japanese forces to assisting the U.S. in anti-terror operations - including in Iraq - and made noises about revising Japan's constitutional restrictions on military activity. (Japanese troops are allowed to act only in self-defense.) When he came to power, Abe made constitutional revision one of his top priorities, and kept...