TOKYO, July 8, 2022—An assassination of former prime minister Shinzo Abe July 8 is likely to radically sway Japanese voters casting their ballots in the July 10 upper house election in a possible boost to the already strongly-favored candidates of his ruling Liberal Democratic Party that’s trumpeting doubling the defense budget.
Abe, 67, the longest-serving prime minister until 2020, had been quietly plotting a comeback hopefully as a Japanese leader over the coming few years if the LDP under the current prime minister, Fumio Kishida, sustains a setback in the Sunday election. That scenario is now tossed and his ‘Abe children’ having been riding on his coattail are likely to wane in power and number, prompting them to regroup. LDP vice president Taro Aso, who was the finance minister under Abe and had also served as a prime minister, is set to lose his political grip significantly with the demise of his long-time confidant.
Abe’s sudden death thus would be welcome news for Kishida, who can anticipate an extra booster of ‘sympathy votes’ for his LDP on Sunday and his 4-pronged policy of economic revitalization, national security, Covid-19 measures, and social wellbeing. Abe and his LDP cronies had been arguing for doubling Japan’s defense spending to 2 percent of GDP from 1 percent. While Kishida favors raising defense outlays he has not explicitly commented on a GDP ratio target and its details.
If LDP loses upper house seats and Abe made a comeback, then Japan could have become even more hawkish and confront China and Russia. Since it won’t happen, Kishida is likely to continue serving even if LDP’s election results are less than what the party targets.
One area that is seen widely unknown as a result of Abe’s death is Japan’s de factor zero interest rate monetary policy that Bank of Japan governor Haruhiko Kuroda, an Abe appointee, has been taking over years. Kuroda, a former MoF bureaucrat, subserviently serves the MoF’s treasury bureau, the issuer of Japanese government securities, that dreads about even a one percent rise of Japanese interest rates because it would mean at least 10 trillion yen ($100 billion) extra refinancing costs forJGBs coming due every year.
The assailant, Tetsuya Yamagami, 41, is a former Maritime Self-Defense Force personnel. He told police that he was not politically motivated to gun down Abe with his home-made shotgun, and that he was ‘dissatisfied’ with what Abe had done, according to Japanese media reports. That leaves one thing standing out as a motive: Like Donald Trump, Abe had greased his cronies and his own pocketbook through the blatant abuse of power, often with the bureaucracy.
In 2016, Abe instructed the Ministry of Finance bureaucracy to sell a government-held land tract at almost 1/10th the then-prevailing market value to Yasunori Kagoike, who owned and managed Moritomo Gakuen School, for its new grade school site.
In another scandal, Abe in 2015 ordered the Ministry of Health Labor and Welfare to approve applications to open a veterinarian department to the Kakei School own and run by Kotaro Kakei, who was Abe’s close friend.
Both cases were flush with rumors of influence-peddling and grafts-giving between Abe and his counterparts but both were not properly investigated as a result of the strange disposal of official government documents. A junior MoF official, who tried to speak the truth about Moritomo scandal, allegedly killed himself. Abe and his wife, Akie, have been under the spotlight of man other questionable activities.
Abe is the son of the late foreign minister, Shintaro Abe, and the grandson of the post-war prime minister, the late Nobusuke Kishi, the bureaucrat-turn prime minister in the 1950s who closely worked for Hideki Tojo but was miraculously spared U.S. occupation forces’ WWI criminal trials. As prime minister Kishi was attacked by a rightwing mob in 1960 and seriously injured but survived.
Abe was the only person who worked as prime minister and was assassinated in post-WWI Japan.
###
Insight Into the Future