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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."