SNA (Kobe) — It was exactly a month ago today that Shinzo Abe was assassinated in Nara by 41-year-old Tetsuya Yamagami. As the passions of that event begin to settle, this is an opportune occasion to reconsider both the benefits and the costs of an administration which lasted longer than any other in Japanese history.

There are two strands of Shinzo Abe’s legacy which seem most fruitful to examine–his economic policies and his nationalist political mission.

In regard to the former, Abe’s proponents claim that his economic policies–Abenomics–revitalized and modernized the Japanese economy. But to declare Abenomics a “success,” there must first be some criteria or benchmark for making a judgment.

The Abe regime certainly did make progress on international trade agreements. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) was a centerpiece of the Abe administration’s strategy. While this initiative suffered a serious blow when Donald Trump became US president and withdrew from TPP negotiations, Abe was credited with pulling together the remaining eleven countries, leading to the signing of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) in March 2018.

The signing of international trade agreements, however, does not necessarily constitute economic success all on its own. For example, economists Sebastien Lechevalier and Brieuc Monfort warned in 2018 that Abenomics as a whole might fail because the policy did not adequately respond to the structural weaknesses of the Japanese economy. In their words: “To the question, ‘Has Abenomics worked?’ our answer is mixed… Five years after these policies were first launched, the results have fallen short of targets, especially in regard to price dynamics and GDP growth.”

Abenomics did appear to be more successful in energizing the post-Bubble economy compared to some previous efforts, such as that of former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, but it always failed to meet the goals that had been set out by Abe himself.

One of the primary stated objectives of Abenomics was to increase the inflation rate. In 2013, when Abenomics was being launched, Abe asserted that overcoming deflation was the most urgent issue facing Japan. His target was to achieve a sustained inflation rate of 2%, which in turn was supposed to spur sustained growth within the Japanese economy. However, despite the best efforts of Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda–and the spending of vast amounts of public funds–the inflation target was never achieved on a sustained basis, representing a clear-cut failure of Abenomics, if measured against its own stated goals.

Another focus of Abenomics was to unleash massive public spending to help stimulate economic growth. While such spending did indeed temporarily boost top-line growth rates, in the long run it was in vain because Abe never fired “the third arrow of Abenomics”–the structural reforms which were supposed to make Japan more competitive in the world market.

Arguably, Abe may have blundered in raising consumption tax rates from 5% to 10%, moves which undercut the policies designed to stimulate consumer spending.

But any Japanese government wishing to boost GDP will have to grapple with the nation’s demographic crisis. As explained in a briefing by the European Union:

Japan’s demographic crisis is the consequence of the combination of two elements: a high life expectancy and a low fertility rate. In 2018, Japan had the second highest life expectancy in the world. Meanwhile, since the 1970s, the country has failed to raise its fertility rate to the replacement level. The working culture, a deterioration of employment opportunities for young men, and the traditional gender division of labour are possible explanations for this trend.

Abenomics clearly failed to adequately address the labor shortage, as each year there are now hundreds of thousands fewer people in Japan’s workforce.

The classic economic policy solution to such a problem is mass immigration, which could energize and expand the national workforce. But Abe was unwilling to take this route, except for a half-hearted, limited work visa reform near the end of his administration.

In the earlier years, Abenomics touted the promise of bringing more women into the workforce using the slogan of “Womenomics.”

Indeed, many Japanese women–about 3.3 million–did join the workforce during the Abe years. From 2012 to 2019, the number of women in private sector management positions rose to nearly 10%. But even these achievements were less substantial than they first appeared. As Mark Crawford notes in an article for Japan Focus: The Asia-Pacific Journal:

Unfortunately, these statistics (the sharp increase of women within the workforce) were misleading insofar as they failed to mention the precarity of the female workforce. In 2017, 50% of the 28 million women in the Japanese labor market were in ‘non-regular’ jobs with few benefits, lower pay, and shorter hours than ‘regular’ (i.e. ‘permanent’) employees, in comparison to just 16.7% of the 35 million male workers. By 2019, these ratios had risen to 56.0% of females and 22.8% of males respectively. Unsurprisingly, women disproportionately bore the brunt of unemployment in the [Covid] recession. Of the record 970,000 people who had just been laid off in April 2020, 710,000 were women, making them the ‘shock absorbers’ of the Japanese economy.

In other words, there has yet to be a sea change in the underrepresentation of women. Abenomics did not constitute the turning point which made women true partners in the Japanese economy. Indeed, it would be fair to say that Womenomics was little more than a temporary safeguard to buy Japan more time to stave off the impending decline. This prospect of decline is unlikely to be reversed unless the nation finds a more effective policy to deal with its demographic crisis.

In short, Abenomics did not raise the living standards of ordinary Japanese, even if it did increase the value of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. It also did not achieve any major structural or social transformations which better prepare Japan for its major economic challenges. Rather, all Abenomics accomplished was to provide Shinzo Abe a long and stable administration floating on a sugar high of massive public spending which could not disguise the lack of genuine advancement.

Turning to the second strand–politics–even within the context of the Liberal Democratic Party, Abe was a rightwing nationalist. He arose in the 1990s as part of a more aggressive generation within the ruling party. He staunchly opposed pacifist Article 9 of the Constitution. In his books, such as Toward a Beautiful Country, Abe argued for Constitution revision and “patriotic education,” including the rewriting of the wartime past.

In 2012, Abe and his party successfully ran under the slogan of “Take Back Japan” (Nippon o torimodosu).” Abe explained that taking back Japan was not just about taking it back from the Democratic Party of Japan regime, but also a battle to take back Japan from “postwar history.”

Abe desired to implant a new Japanese nationalism. He viewed many war remembrance efforts as being “masochistic”–allegedly damaging to Japan’s national pride and international reputation.

Of course, many people were strongly opposed to Abe’s nationalism. Japan Communist Party head Kazuo Shii argued that Abe was promoting a revival of unreconstructed wartime ideology. Former Okinawa Governor Takeshi Onaga questioned whether or not the Japan which Abe wished to “take back” included Okinawa. Others on the left feared that Abe’s nationalism would lead to increased exclusion of minorities and policies of discrimination.

Abe’s views were also anathema to many neighboring countries, especially those which had lived under Japan’s imperial boot not so many decades earlier. Koreans and Chinese felt particularly antagonistic towards the messages Abe promoted. He was sure to draw outrage when, for example, he visited war criminal worshipping Yasukuni Shrine or demanded the removal of Comfort Women monuments.

Author Ayano Ginoza noted that Abe made few friends in the former Japanese colonies with approaches such as this one: “When asked if he would make an official apology for Japan’s colonization of Korea, Abe responded that the definition of what constitutes ‘aggression’ has yet to be established in academia or agreed upon in the international community. Things that happened between nations will look differently depending on whose perspective views the incident.”

Since his assassination a month ago, Abe has been elaborately praised in the Western media for the length and stability of his tenure, as well as the contributions he made to strengthen the US-Japan Alliance and to expand Japan’s military capacity. But with an economic policy that accomplished little of long-term benefit to the Japanese people and the spread of a revisionist nationalism which widened divisions between Japanese and their Asian neighbors, it could be argued that the costs of the Abe era exceeded its benefits.

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