Japanese PM Wants to Promote Democracy in Asia

“A Freedom Agenda for Japan”
By Fred Hiatt
Wednesday, November 15, 2006
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/14/AR2006111401229_pf.html

Japan is in the middle of a national identity crisis and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is looking to shape the country into a promoter of democratic ideals, reports Washington Post correspondent Fred Hiatt.  Hiatt interviewed Abe and wrote of the leader’s ambitious ideas for restoring Japanese patriotism and his desire to have the country serve as a model of democracy and stabilization for other Asian nations.

Hiatt explains how Japan’s national identity has gone from being that of an Empire to leaders of manufacturing to uncertainty.  No longer the industrialized giant they once were—“the 1990s became a ‘lost decade’ of stagnation and recession”—some Japanese are trying to find a “new ‘country identity.’”  Hiatt says that Abe, the first prime minister in Japan born after WWII, is one of them.

Prime Minister Abe believes that Japan and the United States share the values of “freedom, democracy, and the rule of law,” and he says that he wants Japan “to play a role in trying to spread such values, for example in the Asian region…though not, he emphasized, by force.” In addition, Abe also wants to “reach out to other democracies, such as Australia and India, even as China tries to exert influence on a very different basis.”

Elected as prime minister on September 26, 2006, Abe has already made diplomatic contact with China and South Korea, and will have his first official meeting with President Bush in Vietnam this week.  Although Hiatt writes that it is not clear if Abe will succeed in shaping a new role for Japan on the world stage, he admits that “he is trying to pull off something audacious.”