Japan's Abe appeals to centre with softer tone

Tokyo, Oct 15: Will the real Mr Abe please stand up? In the few weeks since Shinzo Abe became Japan's Prime Minister, he has startled both critics and fans by softening his stance on wartime history, reaching out to China and promising that Japan won't go nuclear.

Abe has stuck to his stern, and popular, stance towards Japan's unpredictable neighbour North Korea, moving swiftly and ahead of the United Nations to impose stiff sanctions after Pyongyang said last week that it had conducted a nuclear test.

On other matters, though, Abe has shown a milder side that has dismayed conservatives who want Japan to shed what they see as a ''masochistic'' view of its wartime past and restore pride in its history and traditions.

''When I see how much he has wavered in his view of history, which was his core as a politician, I worry what will happen in the future,'' wrote Takeo Hiranuma, a conservative independent lawmaker who backed Abe's bid to become premier.

Among the remarks that have upset conservatives was an acknowledgment in parliament that wartime leaders, including his own grandfather, had ''great responsibility'' for starting the war.

''I think he wanted to placate the peaceniks,'' said commentator Hideaki Kase.

Abe's acceptance of a historic 1995 statement by then-prime minister Tomiichi Murayama apologising for suffering Japan caused in Asia during the war was also unwelcome to ultra-conservatives.

Many of Abe's remarks since taking office on September 26 appear to have been aimed at laying the groundwork for his ice-breaking summits last week with Chinese President Hu Jintao and South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun.

Beijing and Seoul had declined to hold full-scale summits with Abe's predecessor, Junichiro Koizumi, because of his visits to Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine, where war criminals convicted by an Allied tribunal are honoured along with war dead.

That deep chill in Sino-Japanese relations had worried other Asian countries and Tokyo's key security ally, the United States.

Abe had defended Koizumi's pilgrimages to Yasukuni and has visited the shrine himself in the past. Recently, though, he has declined to say whether he will do so while in office, a strategy that helped put Yasukuni on the back burner at the summits.

Abe also came out firmly this week against suggestions that North Korea's nuclear challenge might push Japan -- the only nation to suffer an atomic attack -- to obtain a nuclear arsenal.

That contrasted with his 2002 remark that having short-range nuclear arms would not violate Japan's pacifist constitution.

On the domestic front, Abe has by no means abandoned his goal of putting more patriotism in school curriculums.

But he avoided packing a new panel on education reform with obvious hard-line conservatives, selecting chemist Ryoji Noyori, a 68-year-old Nobel Prize winner, to head the body.

''It looks as if he tried hard to suppress 'Abe colour','' said an editorial in the conservative Sankei newspaper.

Some Abe critics who saw him as a nationalist ideologue question whether he has really had a change of heart.

''In hindsight, we were very worried how things would turn out under your tenure,'' said an editorial in the liberal Asahi newspaper entitled ''Abe's New Image''.

''So far, though, our worries seem to have been needless,'' the newspaper said, but then went on to hint the prime minister's recent remarks might be part of a guise adopted to appeal to mainstream voters before an upper house election next summer.

Political analysts agree that a desire to woo mainstream voters who find parts of his agenda too extreme is probably the most obvious explanation for Abe's subtle image makeover.

''His real views haven't changed but his electoral strategy has,'' said Yasunori Sone, a political science professor at Keio University in Tokyo.

''Those on the right may see this as a betrayal, but I think he will keep this up because it is the best strategy.'' Others think Abe will eventually revert to what they believe are his true colours. ''Quite a few conservatives are feeling and saying that they have been betrayed,'' commentator Kase said.

''I am more of a realist. I think it's tactical.''

REUTERS

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