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It was hard enough for Shigeru Yokota to know that his only daughter Megumi had suddenly disappeared one day in 1977, almost certainly kidnapped off the street like a string of other Japanese by North Korean agents. But to turn for help to his country's officials?the very people responsible for the safety of Japanese citizens like Megumi?and be met with indifference, or worse: that was a special kind of pain. "At the beginning the government was not supportive at all," says the 73-year-old Yokota, sitting in the lobby of his apartment complex in rainy Kawasaki, a city west of Tokyo, posters of Megumi pinned to the walls. "People would just slap the petitions out of our hands." But when the Yokotas met Shinzo Abe, they knew they'd encountered a different kind of politician. Abe had been active on the abductee issue since the late 1980s, and he arranged meetings for the Yokotas with high-level officials and kept the couple personally updated on Tokyo's progress. But what mattered most to the Yokotas was the sense that Abe truly cared. "Every time he talks to us, I feel like he's always fighting for us," says Shigeru's wife Sakie. "He's a very warm person, very compassionate. That's hard to feel in most Japanese politicians, but I feel it in Abe."

Minoru Morita feels something different for Shinzo Abe. "I think he is the most dangerous politician in Japan," he says. Morita, a liberal political commentator, believes a disquieting nationalism is on the rise in Japan, and he thinks that Abe's immense popularity is a troubling sign of that wave. "Of all the 700 or so Diet members, Abe is the most right-wing, the hottest, the most nationalist," Morita says. "He is the politician who could lead this country to war."

So who's right about Abe, Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary, and the man who will almost certainly win the contest to become the president of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) on Sept. 20?and therefore the next Prime Minister of Japan? Try both. Even more so than his popular boss Junichiro Koizumi, who steps down at the end of the month after more than five years in power, Abe is an unabashed conservative, eager to strengthen the U.S. alliance and promote a more assertive role for Japan abroad?despite the risk of further antagonizing neighbors like China and South Korea. At home he promotes patriotism as an answer to Japan's social ills, and opposed efforts led by Koizumi to allow a woman to ascend to the imperial throne. But to his allies, the aggressive attitude that critics like Morita find alarming is just part of Abe's effort to help Japan become a "normal nation," free to act confidently on the global stage. How you view Abe depends on what you think normal means for Japan. "Abe will stand up and make firm decisions for the Japanese people," says Ichita Yamamoto, an LDP foreign-affairs expert and Abe ally. "But he's not a hard-liner against China or anyone. He's a strategist." A hard-line nationalist or a soft-talking, sympathetic pragmatist; an LDP man to the core or someone who will continue the turn-the-world-upside-down instincts of his mentor Koizumi, Abe is preparing to take the leadership of the world's second-largest economy?and Asia's most advanced democracy?as an enigma, inside and outside his country.

At 51, Abe would be the youngest Japanese Prime Minister in postwar history. His crushing lead in the LDP race?Finance Minister Sadakazu Tanigaki and Foreign Minister Taro Aso, his only opponents, are way behind?means he has been able to run a cautious, purposefully vague campaign, releasing a policy platform that runs to just four pages. "Right now he has the ability to be all things to all people," says Kent Calder, director of the Edwin O. Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies at Johns Hopkins University. "But that will narrow over time." What's certain is that Abe's agenda will be as long as his track record is short: repairing relations with Japan's Asian neighbors, continuing Koizumi's uneven economic reforms, fending off a resurgent political opposition. To succeed, Abe must be as strong as his supporters hope and his critics fear, but use a lighter touch than his predecessor. "Koizumi destroyed the LDP, but he hasn't rebuilt it," says former Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone. "Abe needs to fix the party. He needs to fix what's broken in Japan."

Though Koizumi all but anointed abe as his successor, another leader may bear even more responsibility for boosting Abe to the premiership: Kim Jong Il. As deputy cabinet secretary, Abe accompanied Koizumi on his historic trip to Pyongyang in 2002. After Kim shocked Japan by admitting that North Korea had kidnapped Japanese nationals, including Megumi Yokota, Abe became the face of Tokyo's response. When a group of surviving abductees visited Japan, Abe insisted they not return to the North. "From then on he was very popular on TV and among the general public," says Jun Iio, professor of government at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies. This July, when North Korea test-fired missiles, Abe pushed for economic sanctions, and hinted that Japan needed to develop offensive capabilities to ensure its self-defense. The crisis proved a breaking point for Japan's traditional pacifist disengagement. Suddenly, the world seemed much more threatening, and the public moved closer to Abe's views, which once would have been well right of the mainstream.

This much is known about Abe. He is a born conservative?literally. As the grandson of Nobusuke Kishi and the grandnephew of Eisaku Sato?two of postwar Japan's most powerful and conservative Prime Ministers?Abe always knew which side he was on. Katsuei Hirasawa, now an LDP Diet member, tutored a young Abe for two years, and he recalls taking the primary-school student to his dorm at the University of Tokyo, at the heart of Japan's 1960s political tumult. "He would be right in the middle of pacifist, anti-Sato protests," Hirasawa recalls. "He wasn't angry; just very curious. He kept asking, 'Why are those people bullying my uncle?'"

Abe's grandfather Kishi, too, had been the target of angry protests in 1960, for tying the Japanese military closer to that of the U.S. That's work that Abe, who has made the Japan-U.S. alliance the cornerstone of his foreign policy, will carry on. "Abe's beliefs and values are similar to Kishi's," says Hirasawa. "He's inherited his grandfather's political DNA." But Abe is operating in an environment where the political opposition to his views has greatly diminished. "The fact that the left has fallen out of Japanese politics is important," says Calder. "Inside the LDP the balance of power is moving to the right."

Will Abe tinker with Japan's constitution, and allow greater leeway for the country's Self-Defense Forces (SDF) to act abroad? "I'd like to draft a new constitution with my own hands," he told an LDP convention on Sept. 1, when he declared his candidacy for party president. He won't get the chance to do that; but Abe will almost certainly reinterpret the constitution in a way that allows the military to engage in collective self-defense actions with allies, a move Koizumi?no softie on defense?never pulled off, even while he dispatched Japanese forces to Iraq. Such changes are a way to further cement the country's all-important alliance with the U.S., and position Japan against the inevitable rise of China. In Abe's worldview the two countries have very different national values and are competing for resources and influence. Going back to the close relations of the 1980s is no longer realistic. "[Reinterpretation] would make it clear that the balance of power will be between the U.S.-Japan alliance and China," says Hisahiko Okazaki, an arch-conservative and former diplomat who has become a foreign-policy adviser to Abe. "China has to deal with this reality. We have to be prepared for war."

These are the kind of comments that make Abe's critics nervous. "Abe is the epitome of this anti-Asia, anti-China feeling that is strengthening in Japan," says Morita. Under Koizumi, thanks largely to his repeated visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, Japan's relations with China and South Korea are worse than they've been in decades. It's possible that Abe, who visited Yasukuni in the past and has questioned the validity of the Tokyo trials of Japan's wartime leaders, will worsen the damage. "There's a lot of apprehension in Seoul and Beijing about whether Abe will be as hard-line as his reputation," says Peter Beck, Northeast Asia project director for the International Crisis Group.

Still, Abe remains such an unknown quantity that others believe he may prove surprisingly pragmatic in his foreign policy. Last week he told reporters that Japan had "caused great sufferings and left scars on the peoples of many countries," and he has made clear his desire to resume high-level meetings with China and South Korea, most likely at the APEC summit in Hanoi this November. Most significantly, he has refused to say whether he'll go to Yasukuni as Prime Minister?unlike Koizumi, who made a campaign pledge to visit the shrine. For their part, the leaders in Beijing and Seoul seem ready to meet Abe halfway. "If Abe is in a strong position domestically, it wouldn't surprise me if he doesn't visit Yasukuni," says Malcolm Cook, an Asia director at the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney. "That gives you more space to push on other, more strategic points." If Abe loses popularity at home, however, he may instinctively fall back on a more abrasive nationalism. "He took a pretty strong stance on the North Korea issue, and he may have learned the wrong lesson from that, to be a populist on foreign policy," says Steven Vogel, an associated professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. In today's charged Japanese political atmosphere, that could be dangerous. Few politicians know that better than Koichi Kato, a former secretary-general of the LDP. Once a close ally of Koizumi, Kato had become vocal in his criticism of the Prime Minister's trips to Yasukuni. On Aug. 15, the day Koizumi made his latest visit to the shrine, a right-wing activist allegedly set fire to Kato's family house in the legislator's hometown of Tsuruoka. Kato believes the attack is a symptom of a new "fighting nationalism" that could be easily abused. "It's a time for politicians to be careful about what they say, but Abe is not careful at all," Kato told TIME. "It's easy for politicians to use nationalism to gain popularity. But it will come back to haunt them."

It is Abe's stance on foreign affairs that is responsible for such heat as the LDP race has generated. But Japanese voters care more about their pocketbooks than they do about Yasukuni. The recovering economy is about to record its longest expansion of the postwar era, but poll after poll shows ordinary Japanese are concerned about a growing income disparity that threatens to divide the country into haves and have-nots. Abe's policies to address the issue are vague, amounting to little more than a plan to provide financial aid for failed entrepreneurs to start up new businesses, or help the long-term unemployed get back into the job market.

In essentials, he seems as committed as Koizumi to more economic reform. In one of the few meaningful sections of his campaign book, Towards a Beautiful Country, Abe emphasizes his belief in providing an equality of opportunity, not one of outcome. "A society with no income differential," he writes, "would have no vitality." Abe has little direct economic experience, but that may not matter, says Robert Feldman, Morgan Stanley's co-director for Japan research, if he builds a strong cabinet. "Will he do things the bureaucrats tell him, because he appoints ministers who are docile?" asks Feldman, who hopes Abe will go outside the government for his appointments?as Koizumi did. "[Abe] has to demonstrate that he is as tough as Koizumi."

Inevitably, Abe will be compared with his predecessor. Koizumi was happy to smash the old, sclerotic power structure of the LDP and appeal directly to the public. Abe seems more bound to his party; he is not the natural loner that Koizumi was. That makes him well-liked?even Morita calls him "a very kind, gentle young man." But it may also make him less willing to challenge the party, which Koizumi argued is an obstacle to reform. "He's very uncertain politically," says Iio. "He's not as confident in himself as Koizumi was."

Soon, Abe will need to find some steel. The opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) is now led by Ichiro Ozawa, an ex-LDP leader and veteran of the long campaign to shake up Japanese politics. There will be elections for the Diet's upper house next summer, and Ozawa has few equals as a campaigner. He has been courting politicians in the countryside, where the LDP's stranglehold on power has been eroded by Koizumi's reforms. "We have a great chance to challenge the LDP, especially in the rural areas," says Takeaki Matsumoto, the DPJ's policy chair. Much of Abe's current popularity is a legacy from Koizumi, and if the LDP were to have a disastrous result in the upper-house campaign, many would blame its new leader. "Abe's political life could be very short," says Nobuyuki Idei, the ex-chairman of Sony.

Even if next year's elections go well, Abe will still, to an extent, be surveying a landscape not of his making. The fractured LDP, the half-finished economic reforms, the deep divisions over Yasukuni, the uncertainty over the military's role?all these flow from the Koizumi years. But there is a role to play for the person who makes sense of what a predecessor started. Junji Higashi, a legislator with the New Komeito party who is close to Koizumi, says the outgoing Prime Minister loves to compare himself to Nobunaga Oda, the revolutionary warlord who all but conquered Japan in the 16th century and began the unification of Japan. But Higashi notes that it was Nobunaga's successors, Hideyoshi Toyotomi and Ieyesu Tokugawa, who built a stable rule that endured for more than 250 years. "Koizumi was about creative destruction," says Higashi. "But the man who comes afterward needs to rebuild with a lot of care. That's Abe's role." We shall see.

• Bryan Walsh | Tokyo
• Critics dub him a dangerous nationalist. Fans hail him as a strong leader for an increasingly assertive nation. Meet Shinzo Abe, the man poised to become Japan's new Prime Minister