Despite being wrong about almost everything else, Shinzo Abe was right about the need for Japan to strengthen its national security. But the way to do this can only lie in strengthening relations with South Korea, minimizing the sources for East Asian neighbours to perceive Japan as a threat, and invest further in strictly defensive (not offensive) weapons.
Being distantly related to Shinzo Abe and yet opposed to Japanese nationalism, I have always been sensitive to the damage that Shinzo Abe was doing to the fabric of Japanese society. His was a brand of nationalism that aggrandized the nation without self-awareness, vilified and blamed the foreign other for domestic ills, and generally set Japan significantly back from a path toward the healthy maturation of its modern political institutions. For this, I will never forgive him.
This said, in the spirit of trying to see good things in the dead (even when they were misguided), I will talk about the one point that Shinzo Abe got right about Japanese politics. This is the need to strengthen Japan’s national security, though the reason he advocated for this and the method he set about to achieve it are, in my view, dangerously wrong.
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