Abe’s challenge

As the only nation to have suffered mass casualties from a nuclear bomb, Japan has been understandably nervous about Kim Jong-un’s missile tests. Sales of domestic nuclear bunkers and gas masks have soared and nationally aired TV ads with a chilling ‘Protect and Survive’ flavour urge residents to hunker behind washing machines in basements and stay away from windows. This is one reason why Shinzo Abe, Japan’s long-standing Prime Minister, felt confident enough to surprise the world this week and call a snap election.

In the light of Theresa May’s recent disaster, it seemed to many like a rash move. Here, on the face of it, is a Prime Minister in a very similar position to the one May held in June: seeking to consolidate support at a moment when the opposition is in disarray, predictions of a landslide… But Abe is bullish. If he doesn’t win an outright majority, he says, he will resign. And there are reasons to think he is a far safer bet than May ever was.

There’s the fact that he’s about as seasoned a politician as it is possible to imagine. He has already had three terms as the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) prime minister (there is no limit on the number of terms a Japanese prime minister may hold), and as his people know, he really is the man to face down any threat from crazy Kim Jong-un.

Abe is known as a tough operator over North Korea. He is admired in Japan for getting one over on Kim Jong-il in 2002, when he helped negotiate a deal for Japanese abductees in North Korea to visit Japan — though once in Japan the abductees refused to go back. Abe says that ‘talk for talk’s sake’ between Japan, the US and North Korea has achieved nothing. He now wants to take a different tack and bolster Japan’s ability to take a more active war-fighting stance, currently restricted under the post-war pacifist constitution.