Shinzo Abe Will Forever Be Remembered As the Man Who Put Japan Back in Its Place Globally.
History will remember him as a great statesman who deeply loved his country.
Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was shot and killed on July 8, 2022, while campaigning in the western Japanese city of Nara for the senatorial elections.
Shinzo Abe was the one who brought his country out of the pacifist dogma adopted after the Second World War. He has been instrumental in transforming Japan into a country that cares about its geopolitical and strategic interests and has taken its rightful place in global security governance. He was labeled as a “fascist” by some less evolved minds.
In reality, Shinzo Abe was a civic activist who loved his country, a man who was fundamentally democratic and dedicated to strengthening Japan.
Yet he had inherited a country in deep crisis, economic and financial of course, but also existential. He had to manage an insidious and endless deflationary spiral, the implosion of the credit market, an unprecedented real estate liquefaction, the near eradication of its stock market, a permanent decline in productivity, the loss of competitiveness of what used to be Japan's legendary companies, demography at half-mast, the consequences of a tsunami that devastated Fukushima and killed 16,000 people …
Of Shinzo Abe, we will remember his exceptional voluntarism and his original program that bore his name, the “Abenomics”, based on the famous “3 arrows” that finally allowed the country to emerge from its lost double decade, to return to growth and to stabilize the public debt/GDP ratios.
He dared to apply a fundamentally Keynesian program consisting of increasing public spending, implementing through his central bank a policy of massive money creation, while at the same time decreeing structural reforms allowing for the long-term consolidation of his economy.
From the moment he took office, Shinzo Abe showed incredible determination, neither skimping nor backing down from any decision that would bring his country out of the lethargy into which it had been sinking for some 30 years. Thanks to Abe, Japan was able to face its destiny and even force it. By warding off fate through a genuine cultural and moral revolution that regenerated the labor market through the contribution of women, the elderly, and foreigners.
The measures taken under his impetus, consisting of literally harassing Japanese companies to hire more and more women, or developing the system of daycare centers to facilitate women's work, have allowed Japan today to have a female employment rate higher than that of the United States.
Having found a closed and xenophobic country, Abe revolutionized the posture of his country as the policy toward immigration was turned upside down. Starting in 2017, the procedures for obtaining Japanese residency status were made notoriously easier and shorter, allowing foreign workers to flow in almost exponentially. A fantastic boost was given to a nation that needed it, as nearly 20% of the under 20-year-olds living in Tokyo today were born outside Japan.
Faced with the Japanese decline considered ineluctable by many observers and foreign officials, confronted with catastrophic demography, Shinzo Abe unfolded all his determination to maintain the rank of his country.
Shinzo Abe's conviction was largely inspired by Keynes, who assumed that, until proven otherwise, one can only rely on governments to save the economy, through a strong and efficient public sector, determined public spending, and the energetic activation of monetary policy. We can thus consider that Japan was a laboratory, but also a graveyard where economists and theorists had to bury their certainties.
Indeed, Japan acts as a revelation of truths that are not very pleasant to hear for any orthodox economist, because it disrupts all the received ideas.
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