Hitting His Stride

Whe

n North Korea exploded its nuclear device at 10:36 a.m. on Oct. 9, Shinzo Abe's plane was en route from Beijing to Seoul for a summit with South Korean President Roh Moo Hyun. Upon landing, the new Japanese Prime Minister hurriedly gathered his staff at their Seoul hotel to devise Japan's response to the test. Some aides suggested canceling the summit and returning home to Tokyo immediately. Abe refused. "He was very clear that we weren't going to show that we were confused or anxious," says Hiroshige Seko, a special adviser to the Prime Minister who was with him in Seoul. "We were not going to change our schedule at all. We would be confident and comfortable." Abe was just that. After his meetings with Roh, he announced sanctions against the North that were both swift and stern, declaring: "We cannot in any way tolerate the development and manufacturing of nuclear weapons. The government of Japan shall immediately embark on harsh measures."

For an administration that is less than a month old, North Korea's nuclear shocker posed a difficult trial by fire. But Abe?at 52, Japan's youngest postwar Prime Minister?has aced his debut on the world stage, showing decisiveness and deft diplomacy that have heartened his supporters and confounded his critics. Not only has the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) leader demonstrated his willingness to play hardball with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il, he has also displayed a conciliatory side during fence-mending visits to China and South Korea aimed at easing strained relations between Japan and its neighbors. Abe's approval ratings hover at 70%. "I think he's off to a fast start," U.S. Ambassador Thomas Schieffer said last week. Jeff Kingston, a professor of history at Temple University's Tokyo campus and a former Abe doubter, agrees: "In the campaign he didn't do anything to reassure those who wondered about his youth and inexperience. He has answered a lot of those questions now and hit the ground running."

Abe scored with the Japanese public by quickly meting out tough economic punishment to North Korea, banning its imports and barring its ships from Japanese ports, ahead of sweeping sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council last week. In addition, to counteract fears that Pyongyang's nuclear capabilities could touch off a regional arms race, Abe made it clear that Japan had no intention of developing nuclear weapons?thus drawing Japan closer to its key ally and military protector, the U.S., while reassuring China that North Asia's balance of power was unchanged.

Lashing out at Kim's pariah regime was a relatively easy call for Abe, who has profited by using Pyongyang as a punching bag before. The Prime Minister might still be an ordinary Diet member if he hadn't raised his profile by becoming a vocal advocate for Japanese abducted by Pyongyang?an emotive issue in Japan after North Korea admitted to the kidnappings in 2002. Kim's bomb test was another political gift of sorts. "We are convinced that Kim could be a supporter of Abe," says a half-joking Tsuyoshi Yamaguchi, the shadow foreign minister for the opposition Democratic Party of Japan.

While Abe earned points for his handling of the nuclear crisis?even Yamaguchi admits that the administration "isn't making any mistakes"?his peacemaking visits to Beijing and Seoul will prove even more important, given the economic ties between the three nations and the need to coordinate regional responses to future diplomatic crises. That Abe managed to schedule the meetings at all was an impressive achievement, requiring the blue-blooded conservative to dodge toward the ideological center. China and South Korea had cut off most high-level contacts with Japan to protest former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's visits to the Yasukuni Shrine war memorial, which they view as a monument to Japanese imperialism. Abe was thought to be even more unrepentant than Koizumi on the issue. Yet he recently told the Diet that his government accepted previous official Japanese apologies for the country's aggression in World War II. He also acknowledged the responsibility of Japan's wartime leaders?including his own grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, a cabinet minister during the war who later served as Prime Minister. While parts of his conservative base publicly wondered what had happened to their hawkish prince, Abe's adjustments paved the way for his East Asian summits and offered reassurance that, unlike Koizumi, he won't let ideology get in the way of national interest. "Abe is a political realist," says Kent Calder, director of the Edwin O. Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies at Johns Hopkins University. "His foreign policy will be more multi-directional."

Abe is distinguishing his administration from the previous one in other ways. To compensate for what even his own supporters perceive as a lack of Koizumi's charisma, Abe has taken a team-oriented approach. He packed his cabinet with close associates, expanded the number of prime-ministerial advisers from two to five and began forming a Japanese equivalent of the U.S. National Security Council, reporting directly to the Prime Minister. The creation of Team Abe is an attempt to shift political power away from Kasumigaseki, where Japan's formidable bureaucrats toil. "There's always been a struggle between the LDP and the ministries," says Tomoaki Iwai, a professor of political science at Nihon University. "Abe came through with a White House-style system of strong leadership that Koizumi couldn't quite achieve."

Forming a team is one thing. Winning is another. The question is whether Abe?having "plucked the low-hanging fruit," as Kingston puts it, by taking a tough stance on North Korea?can transfer his momentum to domestic issues such as pension reform and economic inequality, bread-and-butter concerns that will likely push foreign policy off the front pages long before next July's critical upper-house elections. Many analysts are doubtful, not least because Abe has yet to set out his domestic agenda. His maiden Diet speech contained a lot of rhetoric about the need to make Japan a "beautiful country" without mentioning specific, results-oriented policy initiatives that were a hallmark of Koizumi's administration. "He talks about economic revitalization and closing the gap between urban and rural regions, but he insists on cutting public spending," says Nihon University's Iwai. "There are certain inherent contradictions in what he says, and he hasn't addressed them." Adds Etsushi Tanifuji, director of the Institute for Research in Contemporary Political and Economic Affairs at Waseda University: "We'll see Abe's competence as a leader at the end of the year, when budget-drafting time comes."

Seko, Abe's adviser, argues that his boss's performance on North Korea demonstrates exactly what kind of leader he is. "It shows that he is capable in crisis management," says Seko. "On issues like this he is very clear on where he stands." Given Kim Jong Il's track record, Abe can probably count on him to create trouble down the road, giving another boost to the Japanese leader's image as a "fighting politician," as his advisers put it. But Abe, like Koizumi, will ultimately be defined by how well he can manage Japan's recovering economy, solve the government's fiscal woes and ensure LDP dominance at the polls. Dealing with a nuclear crisis may be the easy part.