“Japan is back”: How Shinzo Abe restored Japan’s global standing

Shinzo Abe’s untimely passing brings down the curtain on the career of a leader who redefined Japanese politics and diplomacy. 

During a visit to the United States in February 2013, shortly after becoming Japan’s Prime Minister for the second time – a post he would hold longer than any other Japanese leader – Shinzo Abe declared, “Japan is back”. 

Those three words would come to define Mr. Abe’s unique and unparalleled legacy on Japan’s politics, both at home and abroad, where he did more than any other Japanese leader to raise Japan’s standing on the world’s stage. 

Mr. Abe’s untimely passing on Friday, after being shot by an attacker during a campaign event for a parliamentary election, brings down the curtain on the career of a leader who redefined Japanese politics and diplomacy. 

When Mr. Abe first took the top job in 2006, few would have predicted the legacy he would leave behind. His first stint lasted only a year, and he left it as an unpopular leader tainted by political controversies. 

Japan’s politics, in forever churn, saw numerous leaders come and go, and when Mr. Abe returned for a second innings in 2013, he promised to end the cycle of uncertainty and given Japan a measure of stability that had eluded its political life, as well as restore its image in the world. 

On both fronts, he certainly succeeded. Over the subsequent seven years, Mr. Abe, who retired in August 2020 because of health issues, became his country’s longest-serving PM. 

“Japan is not, and will never be, a tier-two country,” he had said in the 2013 speech , outlining three foreign policy priorities. The first was in making Japan a leader in the rules-based order in the Indo-Pacific region, a term that is now in vogue but one that Mr. Abe was among the first to popularise, even invoking it in his 2007 address to the Indian Parliament when he reflected how “the Pacific and the Indian Oceans are now bringing about a dynamic coupling as seas of freedom and of prosperity”.