The Abe Enigma

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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.