Japan 2023: Still walking in Abe Shinzō’s footsteps

On the basis of a wide range of critically assessed and triangulated secondary and primary sources, including elite interviews and official documentation often in the original language, this article suggests that Japan’s domestic politics, and also its foreign and security policies, displayed a remarkable degree of continuity with the path set by the late Abe Shinzō, and thus carry his imprint. Notable exceptions are Kishida’s initiatives in the energy, economic, and fiscal realms. Amid major scandals and internal readjustments in the majority party, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), Japan’s domestic politics appear to be dominated by a single party maintaining its edge over possible adversaries in a fundamentally non-competitive democratic system. This trend has been further reinforced by growing political disaffection. Public trust in the government in 2023 was at a minimum, while surveys show that more than 40% of the Japanese electorate did not support any specific political party. Against this backdrop, however, the Kishida administration was successful in ending a long-lasting period of deflation in the Japanese economy and coming to terms with the legacy of former PM Abe Shinzō. In fact, the lasting influence of Abe lives on in the LDP’s factional balance, influencing Kishida’s policy stance. Especially in the realm of Japan’s security policy and international relations, 2023 testified to Abe’s legacy. Japan’s changes in its military doctrine and its force posture, together with its strategic outreaches to its east Asian neighbours and European and Pacific players, mirror US grand strategy. In fact, Japan also worked in lockstep with US-led minilateral diplomacy aimed at purposeful multi-layered security ententes, often on an ad hoc basis, to balance China militarily, counter the expansion of its regional diplomatic and economic influence and maintain the status quo along the first island chain. The seeds sown by the second Abe administration bore fruit in Japan’s security embrace of Taiwan, an embrace which capitalised on Abe’s poorly understood 2015 legislative and strategic revolutions. With a focus on the geopolitics of the first island chain, the article then looks at Japan’s burgeoning security cooperation with South Korea and European states. It does so to argue that while Kishida’s Japan is seemingly reactive to US grand strategy, it acts in broad continuity of the course set by the two Abe administrations. After all, under Abe, Japan expanded its strategic partnerships to include European players and NATO. Moreover, while Kishida is not a revisionist nationalist, unlike Abe, Japan’s reset of its relations with Seoul is a by-product of the new Yoon administration’s ability to compromise rather than a result of the Japanese government’s concessions. After analysing the burgeoning Japan-NATO relations, the article concludes with a discussion of Japan’s successful G7 presidency, the apex of minilateral diplomacy in 2023.