Loss and legacy
In a space of a few days, the world lost two leaders: Japan’s two-time Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister Boris “Bojo” Johnson.
Abe was assassinated in the city of Nara in Japan while delivering a political speech, while Boris stepped down after a busload of 60 of his deputies resigned in a graphic vote of “no confidence” due to scandals and conflicts of interest hounding the Boris administration.
Much of the Free World was in grief except China, which resents Japan’s new “non-pacifist” constitution and alliance with the West, and Russia which calls Bojo Johnson a “stupid clown” and the main “supporter of the West in the war in Ukraine” versus Russia.
Abe was a well-liked charismatic diplomat with wise political instincts (being the son of a former Japanese minister). On the other hand, UK’s Conservative Party leader Bojo was a rabble-rouser whose tussled hair (flying here and there) contrasted with the elegant aristocracy of former prime minister Margaret Thatcher and the fiery oratory of labor leader prime minister Tony Blair.
In World War II, Japan and the UK were on opposite sides. Japan lighted the fuse of the global war by bombing the American air base in Hawaii and joining the Axis Group (Germany and Italy), while the UK was one of the Allied’s best battering rams whose Royal Air Force was most feared in aerial dogfights.
While Boris’ hair went into a state of disarray when he was delivering impassioned speeches, Abe was the “ultimate pacifier,” according to his golf buddy former US president Donald Trump. Even Democrat presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden are Abe fans.
Considered a “patriot,” Abe’s domestic policy legacy resuscitated Japan’s moribund economy with easy money and massive government spending, while opening the working class doors to women and immigrants in an unprecedented way. In the international front, Abe erased Japan’s reclusive attitude to world security (partly spurred by guilt over World War II destruction and atrocities), by adopting a new “non-pacifist” Japan and the constitutionally approved (in 2015) deployment of Japanese armed men in conflicts abroad, if warranted.
Japan is now in a transatlantic alliance in trade (with the US, India, and Australia) and has been in major opposition to the excesses of China’s aggression and North Korea’s missile belligerence. Japan is also in a joint venture with the Philippines and other smaller Southeast Asian nations to manufacture smaller arms for war for “military independence” even as Japan is one of the country’s leading trade and aid partners today.
Japan is one of the safest nations to live in, with only 192,000 firearms registered in 2021 (mostly hunting rifles) in a country of 128 million people. Contrast this with America which has more guns than its total population.
It was, therefore, a shock that Japan (which only had one violent killing in 10 shootings in 2021) reported an ex-Navy soldier (Tetsuya Yamagami, 41) using a homemade gun to assassinate one of Japan’s most beloved leaders.
Boris Johnson, on the other hand, has been credited with Brexit that allowed the UK to make independent laws outside of the European Union and, indeed, become the first and most generous donor to the Ukraine War cause. He will be remembered most dearly for those two events.
Meanwhile, Shinzo Abe’s legacy in helping maintain world peace with the US will be Japan’s deathless contribution to society. In a way, the exit of both leaders is a global loss, though that of Abe bears more gravitas than Bojo’s.
Bingo Dejaresco is a financial consultant, media practitioner, and former banker.
