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Japan's three prime ministers from the Satō–Kishi–Abe family and their length in office: Nobusuke Kishi, 3 years, 146 days; Eisaku Satō, 7 years, 242 days; Shinzo Abe, 8 years, 267 days.

The Satō–Kishi–Abe family is one of the most prominent political families in Japan. Nobusuke Kishi, Kishi's brother Eisaku Satō and Kishi's grandson Shinzo Abe served as Prime Minister of Japan for a combined total of over 20 years. Kishi led the Liberal Democratic Party (Japan) in its first election as a combined party, and all politicians from this family are associated with the LDP.[1]

Family Membership

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  • Hidesuke and Miyo Satō had three children:

The family names come first in the following family tree, and Prime Ministers in bold:

Satō ShusukeTanabe YuzuruNakako
Kishi Nobukazu
Kishi YozoKishi Nobumasa
Yoshiko
MoyoSatō IchirōAbe YokoNobuchiyo
Kishi Nobusuke
(adopted son-in-law)		Kishi Nobuo
adopted son of Nobukazu)
Satō HidesukeSatō EisakuSatō ShinjiTomohiro
Abe Akie
Yoshi
Abe MunenoriAbe HidenoriAbe Shinzo
Tame
Abe KanAbe HironobuHiroto
Abe Hyosuke
(adopted son-in-law)		Abe Shintaro
Hondou TsunejiroSachikoMariko
ShizukoUshio Jiro
Yoshimasa OshimaHidekoUshio ShiroUshio Miko
Ushio UmeyoshiUshio Kenji
Ushio Shinji
Nishimura MasaoNishimura HiroshiUshio Yoshiro
Nishimura KenzoUshio Yoshiaki

History

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First generation of politicians

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Ichirō Satō (1889–1958), Nobusuke Satō (1896–1987), and Eisaku Satō (1901–1975) were the sons of Hidesuke Satō and his wife Moyo. Hidesuke was a businessman from a once illustrious samurai family which had fallen on hard times.[2] Hidesuke's grandfather was a samurai of the Chōshū Domain, with their outsized influence in Meiji era Japan, with more Meiji and Taisho prime ministers coming from Yamaguchi than any other prefecture. Hidesuke worked in the Yamaguchi Prefectural Office, but quit in 1898, and started a sake brewing business in Kishida, Tabuse. The family had a history in sake brewing and had held the right for sake brewing for generations.[3] Nobusuke Satō was adopted by his father's older brother Nobumasa Kishi in middle school because the Kishi family had no male heir, becoming Nobusuke Kishi.[4]

Ichirō Satō

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Ichirō Satō

Ichirō Satō graduated from the Naval Academy in 1908.[5] From 1920, Satō was stationed in France, and in 1923, he was appointed as a staff officer in the General Staff of the Imperial Japanese Navy. In 1927, he represented the Imperial Japanese Navy at the Geneva Conference on Naval Disarmament, where he argued that the Japanese Navy was nothing more than a means of self-defense and that Japan could never afford to engage in a war with a great naval power.[5] That same year, he became Chief of Staff of the Combined Fleet, and the following year, he was named Captain of the cruiser Nagara. In 1929, Satō represented the Imperial Navy on the Permanent Military Advisory Committee to the League of Nations, and in 1930, he served as an IJN representative at the London Conference on Naval Disarmament. In 1932, he was appointed First Chief of the Education Bureau, Ministry of the Navy, and later served as vice principal of the Naval War College. In 1938, he was promoted to Vice Admiral and assigned to command the Japanese naval station at Port Arthur, but was transferred to the reserves in 1940 due to ill health. Upon his retirement, he was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon. Thereafter, he embarked on a second career as a naval historian, writing A Fifty-Year History of the Japanese Navy (1943). Satō died of uremia complicated by pneumonia on April 12, 1958[5]

Nobusuke Kishi

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Cropped photo of the wartime Hideki Tōjō cabinet. Kishi is second from the left in the second row, just behind Tōjō's right shoulder.
Hideki Tōjō (right) and Nobusuke Kishi, October 1943.
The Abe family with Nobusuke Kishi and Shinzo Abe in the center.

Nobusuke Kishi passed the extremely difficult entrance examination to enter First High School in Tokyo, the most prestigious high school in the country, and then attended Tokyo Imperial University (now the University of Tokyo), where he graduated from the Faculty of Law in 1920 at the top of his class and with the highest grades in the university's history.[6][7] While at the university, Kishi became a protégé of the right-wing ultranationalist legal scholar Shinkichi Uesugi.[6][8] Because he studied German law under Uesugi, Kishi's views tended toward German-style statism, compared to the more progressive approaches favored by some of his classmates who studied English law.[8] Uesugi was so impressed by Kishi that he sought to make Kishi his successor as a professor in the University of Tokyo Faculty of Law, but Kishi declined.[9] Instead, upon graduation, Kishi entered the Ministry of Commerce and Industry.[6] In 1926–27, Kishi traveled around the world to study industry and industrial policy in various industrialised states around the world, such as the United States, Germany, and the Soviet Union.[10] Kishi became known as one of the more prominent members of a group of "reform bureaucrats" within the Japanese government who favored a statist model of economic development with the state guiding and directing the economy.[11]

Known for his exploitative rule of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo in Northeast China in the 1930s, Kishi was nicknamed the "Monster of the Shōwa era" (昭和の妖怪; Shōwa no yōkai).[12]

Kishi has been described as the "mastermind" behind the industrial development of Japan's puppet state in Manchuria.[13] Kishi had first come to the attention of the Kwantung Army officers as a rising star in the Ministry of Commerce and Industry who openly touted the policies of Nazi Germany and called for policies of "industrial rationalization" to eliminate capitalist competition in support of state goals—ideas that accorded with the Army's idea of a "national defense state".[14] In 1935, Kishi was appointed Manchukuo's Deputy Minister of Industrial Development.[15] Kishi was given complete control of Manchukuo's economy by the military, with the authority to do whatever he liked just as long as industrial growth was increased.[16]

In 1936, Kishi was one of the drafters of Manchukuo's first Five-Year Plan.[17] Clearly modeled on the Soviet Union's First Five-Year Plan, Manchukuo's Five-Year Plan was intended to dramatically boost heavy industry in order to vastly increase production of coal, steel, electricity, and weapons for military purposes.[15][18] In order to enact the new plan, Kishi persuaded the military to allow private capital into Manchukuo, successfully arguing that the military's policy of having state-owned corporations leading Manchukuo's industrial development was costing the Japanese state too much money.[15] One of the new public-private corporations founded to assist in carrying out the Five-Year Plan was the Manchuria Industrial Development Company (MIDC), established in 1937, which attracted a staggering 5.2 billion yen in private investment, making it by far the largest capital project in the Japanese empire; by comparison, the total annual budget of Japan's national government was 2.5 billion yen in 1937 and 3.2 billion yen in 1938.[18] The man handpicked by Kishi to lead the MIDC was his distant relative and old First High School classmate, Nissan Group founder Ayukawa Yoshisuke.[19] As part of the deal, the Nissan Group's entire operations were supposed to be transferred over to Manchuria to form the basis of the new MIDC.[19] The system that Kishi pioneered in Manchuria of a state-guided economy where corporations made their investments on government orders later served as the model for Japan's post-1945 development, and subsequently, that of South Korea and China as well.[13]

In order to make it profitable for the zaibatsu to invest in Manchukuo, Kishi had a policy of lowering the wages of the workers to the lowest possible point, even below the "line of necessary social reproduction".[16] The purpose of Manchukuo was to provide the industrial basis for the "national defense state", with American historian Mark Driscoll noting that, "Kishi's planned economy was geared towards production goals and profit taking, not competition with other Japanese firms; profit would come primarily from rationalizing labor costs as much as possible. The ne plus ultra of wage rationalization would be withholding pay altogether—that is, unremunerated forced labor."[20] Accordingly, the Japanese conscripted hundreds of thousands of Chinese as slave labor to work in Manchukuo's heavy industrial plants. In 1937, Kishi signed a decree calling for the use of slave labor to be conscripted both in Manchukuo and in northern China, stating that in these "times of emergency" (i.e. war with China), industry needed to grow at all costs while guaranteeing healthy profits for state and private investors.[21] From 1938 to 1944, an average of 1.5 million Chinese were taken every year to work as slaves in Manchukuo.[22] The harsh conditions of Manchukuo were well illustrated by the Fushun coal mine, which at any given moment had about 40,000 men working as miners, of whom about 25,000 had to be replaced every year as their predecessors had died due to poor working conditions and low living standards.[18]

Kishi showed little interest in upholding the rule of law in Manchukuo.[23] Kishi expressed views typical of his fellow colonial bureaucrats when he disparagingly referred the Chinese people as "lawless bandits" who were "incapable of governing themselves".[23] According to Kishi's subordinates, he saw little point in following legal or juridical procedures because he felt the Chinese were more akin to dogs than human beings and would only understand brute force.[23] According to Driscoll, Kishi always used the term "Manshū" to refer to Manchukuo, instead of "Manshūkoku", which reflected his viewpoint that Manchukuo was not actually a state, but rather just a region rich in resources to be used for Japan's benefit.[23]

As a self-described "playboy of the Eastern world", Kishi was known during his four years in Manchukuo for his lavish spending amid much drinking, gambling, and womanizing.[24] Kishi spent almost all of his time in Manchukuo's capital, Xinjing (modern Changchun, China) with the exception of monthly trips on the world famous Asia Express railroad line to Dalian, where he indulged in his passion for women in alcohol- and sex-drenched weekends.[25] When he was locked up in Sugamo prison in 1946 awaiting trial, he reminisced about his Manchukuo years: "I came so much, it was hard to clean it all up”.[25] According to Driscoll, "photographs and written descriptions of Kishi during this period never fail to depict a giddy exuberance: laughing and joking while doling out money during the day and looking forward to drinking and fornicating at night."[26] Kishi was able to afford his hedonistic, free-spending lifestyle as he had control over millions of yen with virtually no oversight, thanks to being deeply involved in and profiting from the opium trade.[27] Before returning to Japan in October 1939, Kishi is reported to have advised his colleagues in the Manchukuo government about corruption: "Political funds should be accepted only after they have passed through a 'filter' and been 'cleansed'. If a problem arises, the 'filter' itself will then become the center of the affair, while the politician, who has consumed the 'clean water', will not be implicated. Political funds become the basis of corruption scandals only when they have not been sufficiently 'filtered.'"[28]

Kishi later served in the wartime cabinet of Prime Minister Hideki Tōjō as Minister of Commerce and Vice Minister of Munitions,[29] and co-signed the declaration of war against the United States on December 7, 1941.

After World War II, Kishi was imprisoned for three years as a suspected Class A war criminal. However, the U.S. government did not charge, try, or convict him, and eventually released him as they considered Kishi to be the best man to lead a post-war Japan in a pro-American direction. With U.S. support, he went on to consolidate the Japanese conservative camp against perceived threats from the Japan Socialist Party in the 1950s. Kishi was instrumental in the formation of the powerful Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) through a merger of smaller conservative parties in 1955, and thus is credited with being a key player in the initiation of the "1955 System", the extended period during which the LDP was the overwhelmingly dominant political party in Japan.[30][28]

As prime minister, Kishi's mishandling of the 1960 revision of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty led to the massive 1960 Anpo protests, which were the largest protests in Japan's modern history and which forced him to resign in disgrace.[31] Four years later his younger brother Eisaku Satō became prime minister.

Eisaku Satō

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From left - Hiroko, Shinji, Eisaku, Ryutaro, & Fujieda (Matsuoka), 1931

Eisaku Satō studied German law at Tokyo Imperial University and in 1923, passed the senior civil service examinations. Upon graduation the following year, he became a civil servant in the Ministry of Railways. Satō married Hiroko Matsuoka (松岡 寛子, 5 January 1907 – 16 April 1987) in 1926 and had two sons, Ryūtarō and Shinji. Hiroko's father, Matsusuke Satō, was Eisaku's paternal uncle. After Matsusuke died in 1911, Hiroko was raised by her maternal uncle, diplomat Yōsuke Matsuoka. Their son Shinji followed his father into politics, serving in both houses and as a cabinet minister. Shinji's son-in-law, Masashi Adachi, currently serves in the House of Councillors, and formerly worked as an aide for his cousin-in-law, Eisaku's grandnephew, Shinzo Abe. In a 1969 Shukan Asahi interview with novelist Shūsaku Endō, Hiroko accused Satō of being a rake and a wife-beater.[32]

Satō served as Director of the Osaka Railways Bureau from 1944 to 1946 and Vice-Minister for Transport from 1947 to 1948.[33]

Satō entered the Diet in 1949 as a member of the Liberal Party. He served as Minister of Postal Services and Telecommunications from July 1951 to July 1952. Sato gradually rose through the ranks of Japanese politics, becoming chief cabinet secretary to then prime minister Shigeru Yoshida from January 1953 to July 1954. He later served as minister of construction from October 1952 to February 1953.

After the Liberal Party merged with the Japan Democratic Party to form the Liberal Democratic Party, Satō served as chairman of the party executive council from December 1957 to June 1958, followed by a post as minister of finance in the cabinet of his brother Nobusuke Kishi from 1958 to 1960. As minister of finance, Sato requested the US to fund conservatives.[34]

Satō also served in the cabinets of Kishi's successor as prime minister, Hayato Ikeda. From July 1961 to July 1962, Satō was Minister of International Trade and Industry. From July 1963 to June 1964 he was concurrently head of the Hokkaidō Development Agency and of the Science and Technology Agency. In 1964 he succeeded Hayato Ikeda as prime minister, becoming the first prime minister to have been born in the 20th century and the second prime minister to come from his family.

As prime minister, Satō presided over a period of rapid economic growth. He would go on to serve the longest stint of any prime minister up until that time, and by the late 1960s he appeared to have single-handed control over the entire Japanese government. He was a popular prime minister due to the growing economy; his foreign policy, which was a balancing act between the interests of the United States and China, was more tenuous. Student political radicalization led to numerous protests against Satō's support of the United States–Japan Security Treaty, and Japanese tacit support for American military operations in Vietnam. This opposition peaked with the 1968–1969 Japanese university protests, which eventually forced Satō to close the prestigious University of Tokyo for a year in 1969.[35]

Satō arranged for the formal return of Okinawa (Ryukyu Islands; occupied by the United States since the end of the Second World War) to Japanese control. He brought Japan into the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, for which he received the Nobel Peace Prize as a co-recipient in 1974. After three terms as prime minister, Satō decided not to run for a fourth. His heir apparent, Takeo Fukuda, won the Sato faction's support in the subsequent Diet elections, but the more popular MITI minister, Kakuei Tanaka, won the vote, ending the Satō faction's dominance.

Kan Abe

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Kan Abe, father of Yoko Abe

Kan Abe was born on 29 April 1894, in Heki (present-day Nagato), Yamaguchi Prefecture, the eldest son of Abe Hyōsuke and his wife Tame. The Abe family was a prominent family of landowners and sake and soy sauce brewers in Heki who had served as nanushi (village heads) in the Edo period.[36] His father was from the Mukunoki family, a prominent family in Ōtsu, who was adopted into his wife's family upon marriage. Both his parents died by the time he was four, after which he was raised by his aunt Yoshi.[37][38][39] Abe graduated from Tokyo Imperial University, the predecessor of the University of Tokyo.

Abe stood as a Seiyūkai Party candidate in the February 1928 general election but lost; he was appointed village mayor of Heki in 1933 and later served in the Yamaguchi prefectural assembly. He was elected to the House of Representatives as an independent candidate in the February 1937 general election. He earned the nickname "New Shōin" or "Shōwa Shōin" in honor of the earlier leader from Yamaguchi, Yoshida Shōin.[40]

In the 1942 general election, he ran on a platform opposing the militarist government under Hideki Tojo, which had by this time taken away most powers from the Diet. The Tojo cabinet had attempted to block antiwar candidates from running through a registration system, notwithstanding which Abe won a Diet seat, which he used for an attempt to oust Tojo and end World War II. Abe was assisted in this effort by Takeo Miki, who became prime minister after the war.[41] Abe died of a heart attack in January 1946 while preparing to run in the first post-war general election.

Second generation

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The Abe family in 1956 (left to right): Yōko, Shintaro and their children Shinzo Abe and Hironobu Abe.

Yōko Abe

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Yōko Kishi was born in 1928 as the eldest daughter of Nobusuke Kishi. She would go on to marry Shintaro Abe, becoming Yōko Abe. She was the mother of Hironobu Abe, Shinzo Abe, and Nobuo Kishi.[42][43]

Known for her calligraphy,[44] she was considered to be the "Godmother" of the Kishi-Abe family (a Japanese political family for three generations),[45] and had long been the leader of the wives of members of Seiwa Seisaku Kenkyūkai.[46] She was called the "Godmother of the World of Politics" because she had many followers in politics.[47] Yōko Abe died on 4 February 2024, at the age of 95.[48]

Shintaro Abe

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Shintaro Abe was born on April 29, 1924, in Tokyo, the only son of a politician and member of Parliament Kan Abe. He was raised in his father's home prefecture of Yamaguchi from soon after his birth. His mother was an army general's daughter.[49] After graduating from high school in 1944 during World War II, Abe entered a naval aviation school and volunteered to become a kamikaze pilot. The war ended before he could undergo the required training.[50] In 1949 he graduated from the Faculty of Law at the University of Tokyo, Shintaro Abe began his career as a political reporter for Mainichi Shimbun.[51] He became a politician in 1957 when he started working as a legislative aide of his father-in-law, the then-prime minister Nobusuke Kishi.[51] He won his father's seat in the House of Representatives in 1958.[49]

He led a major LDP faction, the conservative Seiwa Seisaku Kenkyūkai, whose reins he took from former Prime Minister Takeo Fukuda in July 1986, and held a variety of ministerial and party posts, the former of which included Minister of Agriculture and Forestry and Minister of International Trade and Industry.[49] Abe was named as Minister of International Trade and Industry in the cabinet of the then prime minister Zenkō Suzuki on November 30, 1981.[52] During this period, he was seen as a young leader groomed for the future prime ministry.[52] In November 1982, he was appointed Minister for Foreign Affairs in the cabinet of the then-prime minister Yasuhiro Nakasone, replacing Yoshio Sakurauchi. His term lasted until 1986.[53]

Abe was a top contender to succeed Nakasone as prime minister in 1987 until he stepped aside for Noboru Takeshita, head of a powerful rival faction. Then, he was given the post of secretary general of the party in 1987.[53] In 1988, his chances of becoming prime minister sometime in the near future were again thwarted when his name became associated with the Recruit-Cosmos insider-trading stock scandal, which brought down Takeshita and forced Abe to resign as the party's secretary general in December 1988.[53] Shintaro Abe was hospitalized in January 1991.[49] He died at Tokyo's Juntendo University Hospital on May 15, 1991, aged 67. The cause of death was heart failure.[50][51][54]

Shinji Satō

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Shinji Satō was the second son of Eisaku Satō

Shinji Satō (佐藤 信二 Satō Shinji, February 8, 1932 – May 3, 2016) was a Japanese politician who served as a member of the House of Representatives (1979–2000 and 2003–2005) and House of Councillors (1974–1979), as Minister of International Trade and Industry (1996–1997), and as Minister of Transport (1988–1989). He was the second son of Prime Minister Eisaku Satō. Satō announced in 2012 that he had a document signed between his father and U.S. President Richard Nixon that would allow American nuclear weapons to be brought to Okinawa in emergencies.[55]

Third generation

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Hironobu Abe

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Hironobu Abe (安倍 寛信; born May 30, 1952) is a Japanese businessman. He is the CEO of AB Communications and former CEO of Mitsubishi Corporation Packaging. A scion of the Satō–Kishi–Abe family, he is the eldest son of politician Shintaro Abe, and the older brother of former Prime Minister of Japan Shinzo Abe and former Minister of Defense Nobuo Kishi. Abe was a grandson of former prime minister Nobusuke Kishi and a grand-nephew of former prime minister Eisaku Satō.

Hironobu Abe was born in 1952 in Tokyo to Shintaro Abe and Yoko Abe. After attending Seikei Elementary School, Seikei Junior and Senior High School, he entered the Faculty of Economics at Seikei University in 1971. He graduated from either Seikei University or the University of Tokyo in March 1975.[56][57] The following year he joined Mitsubishi Corporation and was assigned to the Resources Division No. 3.[58][59][60] Abe worked in Tokyo, Hiroshima, Kyushu, Toronto, and London managing business investments. In February 2004, he was appointed head of Mitsubishi Corporation's China branch, and in April 2007, he was appointed executive officer of Mitsubishi Corporation. It was rare for a head of a China branch to be appointed to a board position, and this unusual appointment was greeted with a wave of surprise.[61]

Abe served as President and Representative Director of Mitsubishi Corporation Packaging from 2012 to 2021 before retiring altogether from the company in 2022.[62][63][60][64][65][66] After his retirement at Mitsubishi he maintained a part-time advisory role while also being appointed outside director of Yamaeo Group Holdings, Seikei Gakuen, and Fumakilla.[67]

Shinzo Abe

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Abe in 2006. He was the youngest prime minister since Fumimaro Konoe in 1941.

Shinzo Abe (Japanese: 安倍 晋三, Hepburn: Abe Shinzō, IPA: [abe ɕindzoː]; 21 September 1954 – 8 July 2022) was longest-serving prime minister in Japanese history, serving for almost nine years in total. He served as Prime Minister of Japan and President of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) from 2006 to 2007 and again from 2012 to 2020. Abe also served as Chief Cabinet Secretary from 2005 to 2006 under Junichiro Koizumi and was briefly the opposition leader in 2012.

After graduating from Seikei University and briefly attending the University of Southern California, Abe was elected to the Japanese House of Representatives in the 1993 election. Abe was appointed Chief Cabinet Secretary by Prime Minister Koizumi in 2005 before replacing him as prime minister and LDP president the following year. Confirmed by the National Diet, Abe became Japan's youngest post-war prime minister and the first born after World War II. Abe resigned as prime minister a year later due to ulcerative colitis and his party's recent election losses. After recovering, Abe staged an unexpected political comeback by defeating Shigeru Ishiba, the former defense minister, to become LDP president in 2012. Following the LDP's landslide victory in that year's general election, Abe became the first former prime minister to return to office since Shigeru Yoshida in 1948. He led the LDP to further victories in the 2014 and 2017 elections, becoming Japan's longest-serving prime minister. In 2020, Abe again resigned as prime minister, citing a relapse of his colitis, and was succeeded by Yoshihide Suga.

Abe was a staunch conservative and associated with the Nippon Kaigi, which holds negationist views on Japanese history, including denying the role of government coercion in the recruitment of comfort women during World War II, a position which caused tensions particularly with South Korea. Under his premiership, Japan–South Korea relations further strained in 2019 over disputes about reparations.[68] Earlier that same year, Abe's government initiated a trade dispute with South Korea after the South Korean Supreme Court ruled that reparations be made by Japanese companies who had benefited from forced labor. Abe was considered a hard-liner with respect to Japan's military policies. In 2007, he initiated the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue during his first tenure as prime minister, aimed at resisting China's rise as a superpower. He advocated for amending Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution to legally codify the status of the Japan Self-Defense Forces (JSDF). However, this was never achieved during his lifetime. He enacted military reforms in 2015 that allowed Japan to exercise collective security by allowing JSDF deployments overseas, the passage of which was controversial and met with protests. Economically, Abe attempted to counter Japan's economic stagnation with "Abenomics", with mixed results. He was also credited with reinstating the Trans-Pacific Partnership with the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership.

On 8 July 2022, Abe was assassinated while delivering a campaign speech in Nara two days before the 10 July upper house elections. The suspect, Tetsuya Yamagami, who was immediately arrested by Japanese police, confessed to targeting the former prime minister because of Abe's reported ties with the Unification Church. This was the first assassination of a former Japanese prime minister since 1936. A polarizing figure in Japanese politics, Abe was described by supporters as having worked to strengthen Japan's security and international stature, while opponents described his nationalistic policies and negationist views on history as threatening Japanese pacifism and damaging relations with East Asian neighbors including China and South Korea.

Akie Abe

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Akie with Shinzo Abe, 1 January 2020

Akie Matsuzaki (松崎 昭恵, Matsuzaki Akie) was born on 10 June 1962. She is from a wealthy Japanese family; her father is the former president of Morinaga & Co., one of Japan's largest confectionery companies. She was educated at Sacred Heart School in Tokyo (or Seishin Joshi Gakuin), a Roman Catholic private elementary through high school, then graduated from Sacred Heart Professional Training College. Akie later worked for Dentsu Inc., the world's largest advertising agency, before marrying Shinzo Abe in 1987. After this she became known as Akie Abe. The couple had no children, having undergone unsuccessful fertility treatments earlier in their marriage.[69] The two would remain married until Shinzo's assassination on 8 July 2022.

In the late 1990s, Abe worked as a radio disc jockey in her husband's hometown of Shimonoseki. She was popular in the broadcast area and was known by her jockey name, "Akky".[70]

Following her husband's first stint as prime minister, she opened an organic izakaya in the Kanda district of Tokyo, but was not active in management due to the urging of her mother-in-law.[71] She received a master's degree in Social Design Studies from Rikkyo University in March 2011.

Akie became popularly known as the "domestic opposition party" due to her outspoken views, which often contradicted her husband's.[71] Abe is also known as a supporter of sexual minorities and the LGBT community. On April 27, 2014, she joined the gay pride parade in Tokyo to show her support for broader rights to Japan's LGBT community.[72] In 2015, she was photographed standing in a field of cannabis plants promoting the revival of the cannabis culture in Japan.[73]

While her husband was in office, Abe developed a close relationship with the Moritomo Gakuen kindergarten in Osaka, which is noted for its conservative and militarist culture, including requiring students to memorize the Imperial Rescript on Education. Abe was named as honorary principal of Mizuho no Kuni, an elementary school under development by Moritomo Gakuen, but resigned in February 2017 after it was discovered that Moritomo Gakuen had purchased the land for the school from the government for 14% of its appraised value.[74] The Moritomo Gakuen scandal highlighted the complicated role of the prime minister's wife in Japan: although Abe herself was not considered a civil servant, she was supported by a staff of five civil servants seconded from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, thus implying that her role carries public duties.[75]

Akie was the first spouse of a Japanese prime minister to actively use social media, and was particularly personally active on Facebook and Instagram, but dramatically reduced her social media activities and changed the style of her posts in the wake of the Moritomo Gakuen scandal.[76]

Nobuo Kishi

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Nobuo Kishi

Nobuo Kishi sat in the House of Representatives from 2012 to 2023 representing Yamaguchi’s 2nd District as a member of the Liberal Democratic Party. From September 2020 to August 2022 he served as the Minister of Defense. He is the younger brother of Shinzo Abe. Shortly after his birth, he was adopted by his maternal uncle, Seibu Oil chairman Nobukazu Kishi, who could not have children of his own.[77] He did not know about his actual parentage or his relationship with Shintaro Abe's other sons Hironobu Shinzo until he was preparing to enter university.

Kishi spent the first decade of his life living in Tokyo with his grandfather, former prime minister Nobusuke Kishi.[78] He graduated from the Faculty of Economics at Keio University in 1981 and joined Sumitomo Corporation, where he worked until 2002. His postings included the United States, Vietnam, and Australia.

With his brother Abe's backing, Kishi was elected to the House of Councillors in 2004, representing Yamaguchi Prefecture.[78] He became known as a specialist in security issues.[79] He has served as Parliamentary Secretary for Defense (Fukuda and Aso Cabinet), Vice Chairman, LDP Diet Affairs Committee in the House of Councillors, Vice Chairman, Party Organization and Campaign Headquarters of LDP, chairman, Special Committee on Okinawa and Northern Problems.[80]

Kishi was elected to the House of Representatives in the 2012 Japanese general election after resigning from his House of Councillors seat. He re-took a seat in Yamaguchi Prefecture that had previously belonged to his grandfather Nobusuke Kishi and great-uncle Eisaku Sato, but that had been lost to the Democratic Party of Japan in the 2009 Japanese general election.[78] Following the 2012 election, Kishi's brother Abe became prime minister. Kishi was promoted to Senior Vice Foreign Minister in 2013.[81]

Kishi became known during this time for his role in promoting the Japan-Taiwan relationship. He helped to arrange an historic meeting between Prime Minister Abe and ROC opposition leader Tsai Ing-wen in 2015.[78] After Tsai's reelection as president, Kishi met with Tsai in Taiwan in January 2020 and again in July 2020 (when he attended the funeral of President Lee Teng-hui).[82] In 2019, he publicly advocated for Japan acquiring strike capabilities as a defensive measure against North Korea, stating that Japan should not rely upon the United States for defense.[79]

Kishi was appointed as Minister of Defense under Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga in September 2020. Commentator Michael Bosack described this as "a strange pick that signals factional influence and possibly a personal favor," and argued that the faction led by Hiroyuki Hosoda was clearly trying to build Kishi's credentials.[83] Following the news of Kishi's appointment, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman expressed hope that Japan would refrain from developing official ties with Taiwan.[82]

In October 2020, Kishi released a joint statement with Australian Minister of Defense Linda Reynolds that announced that Japan's Self Defense Forces would be enabled to protect Australian military assets, an act which was made legal in September 2015 through the "Peace and Security Preservation Legislation" passed under the Abe administration. This makes Australia the second country (after the United States) whose assets Japan would be permitted to protect.[84] Kishi and Reynolds also emphasized their opposition to "any destabilizing or coercive unilateral actions that could alter the status quo and increase tensions in the East China Sea," and some analysts have speculated this to be in reference to Chinese maritime activities around the Senkaku Islands.[85] In a September 2021 interview with the Mainichi Shimbun, Kishi stated that Japan cannot stand aside when events occur in Taiwan due to being close neighbors and allies with shared universal values such as freedom and democracy.[86] In 2021, he visited the controversial Yasukuni Shrine, making him the first sitting Defense Minister to do so since 2016. In response, the South Korean Foreign Ministry described his visit as "deplorable".[87]

After Suga's resignation as prime minister, his successor Fumio Kishida opted to retain Kishi as Defense minister after taking office in October 2021. Nikkei noted that this sent a message of continuity in Japan's policies toward China and Taiwan.[88]

After the assassination of Shinzo Abe on 8 July 2022, Nobuo Kishi had to disclose that the relationship with the controversial Unification Church, also known as the "Moon Sect", extends to him. Kishi acknowledged that members of the group participated as volunteers in his campaign activities, including tasks such as telephone campaigning.[89][90][91] Kishida replaced him as Defense Minister a month later.[92] He announced plans to resign from the House of Representatives due to health issues, making way for a by-election on April 23, 2023.[93]

Masashi Adachi

[edit]
Masashi Adachi, son-in-law of Shinji Satō

Masashi Adachi (阿達 雅志 Adachi Masashi, b. September 27, 1959) is a Japanese politician who serves as a member of the House of Councillors and as a State Minister for Internal Affairs and Communications.

Adachi was born in Sakyo-ku, Kyoto, and grew up in Fukui, Sakai, and Takatsuki. He graduated from the University of Tokyo and joined Sumitomo Corporation in 1983, where he worked on rail car exports to the United States. He obtained an MCJ and LLM from the New York University School of Law in 1993, and became qualified as a lawyer in New York. He thereafter worked in the legal department of Sumitomo, and in the executive office of its Chinese subsidiary. He left Sumitomo in 2000, and thereafter worked for his father-in-law Shinji Sato 2003 to 2004. He then worked for the law firm of Paul Weiss in Tokyo from 2004 to 2014.[94]

He ran as a Liberal Democratic Party candidate for the House of Councillors in the 2007 election but lost.[95] He joined the law school faculty of Nihon University as an adjunct professor in 2008. He again ran as an LDP candidate in the 2010 House of Councillors election and lost.[96]

He finally entered the House of Councillors as a runner-up after Yukari Sato resigned in December 2014 to run in the 2014 Japanese general election,[97] and won re-election in the 2016 House of Councillors election.[98]

He was appointed as a vice-minister for the Cabinet Office and Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism in 2018 under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.[99]

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