Former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe yesterday won an election to become the leader of the opposition Liberal Democratic Party putting him in line to become Prime Minister of Japan for a second time after upcoming elections in Japan.
Abe is a rightist politician from a long-standing Japanese political family. His grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi (1896-1987), was Minister of Commerce and Industry during the war (1941-45) and prime minister from 1957 to 1960, resigning in the midst of the wave of popular opposition that engulfed Japan when the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation with the United States came up for renewal.
Kishi was charged as being a Class A War Criminal but was never indicted or brought to trial by the occupying Allied Powers.
Some would argue that Kishi's appointment to post war Japan's cabinet would be on a level of the reinstatement of Albert Speer to a post 1945 German administration.
Abe is now 58 and claims he has fully recovered from a bout of ulcerative colitis that forced him to resign his first premiership.
Shinzo Abe is an unavowed nationalist hawk who aims to re-write Japan's post war constitution, deny Japan's responsibility for the "Comfort Women" of World War II, rewrite school text books to reflect his revisionist view of history and to visit Yasukuni Shrine in any official capacity he may hold in the future.
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Japan Shinzo Abe politics LDP Koizumi
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