Shinzo Abe, the longest-serving Japanese Prime Minister, who made it his political mission to vanquish his country’s wartime ghosts but fell short of his ultimate goal of restoring Japan as a normalised military power, was assassinated on Friday in the city of Nara, Japan. He was 67.

His death, from injuries sustained in a shooting during a speech at a campaign event, was confirmed by Dr Hidetada Fukushima, professor in charge of emergency medicine at Nara Medical University Hospital.

Abe, the scion of a staunchly nationalist family of politicians that included a grandfather who was accused of war crimes before becoming Prime Minister, made history by leading Japan for nearly eight consecutive years, beginning in 2012.

It was a remarkable feat of longevity not only because of Japan’s record of rapid turnover in Prime Ministers but also because Abe himself had lasted just a year in an earlier, ill-fated stint as the country’s leader.

His long run in office, however, delivered only partial victories on his two primary ambitions: to unfetter Japan’s military after decades of postwar pacifism and to jump-start and overhaul its economy through a programme known as Abenomics.

And in August 2020, just four days after he had set the record for the longest uninterrupted run as Japanese leader, Abe resigned as Prime Minister because of ill health, a year before his term was set to end.

One of his most significant moves as Prime Minister came in 2015 when he pushed through legislation that authorised overseas combat missions alongside allied troops in the name of “collective self-defence” after huge public protests and a contentious battle with Opposition politicians.

But he failed in his long-held dream of revising the war-renouncing clause of Japan’s Constitution, which was put in place by American occupiers after World War II. Abe, in the end, proved unable to sway a Japanese public unwilling to risk a repeat of the horrors of that war.

Under his economic programme, Abe imposed a form of shock therapy that involved cheap cash, government spending on stimulus projects that expanded the country’s debt, and attempts at corporate deregulation. The combination delivered results in the early years of his term, lifting the economy out of an unrelenting malaise and raising Abe’s international profile.

A key factor in Abe’s economic platform was an effort to empower women, as he argued that increasing their participation in the workforce would help counterbalance a declining and ageing population. But some of the early promises of his “Womenomics” agenda — such as drastically raising the proportion of women in management and in government — did not come to fruition.

On the international stage, Abe was one of the few world leaders to maintain a consistently close relationship with President Donald J. Trump. He hosted two visits by the American leader, including one in which Trump met the newly enthroned emperor, Naruhito.

Abe also hosted President Barack Obama when he became the first American President to visit Hiroshima, the site of one of the two atomic bombings by the US at the end of World War II.

And after years of a chilly relationship with China, Abe tried to usher in a warmer era, making the first visit to Beijing by a Japanese Prime Minister in seven years when he met with President Xi Jinping in 2018.

After the Trump administration pulled out of a multinational trade agreement between the US and 11 other countries around the Pacific Rim, Abe kept the remaining countries in a coalition that enacted the pact in 2018 without the US.

He met dozens of times with the Russian President, Vladimir V. Putin, in the hopes of negotiating a settlement over four contested islands north of Japan that were seized by the Soviet Union at the end of the war.

Abe’s father had long tried and failed, to resolve the territorial dispute, and the son was unable to resolve it, too. As a result, the countries have yet to sign a peace treaty to officially end the war between them.

While Abe worked to cultivate diplomatic and trade relations around the world, he never lost sight of his nationalist agenda at home. A year after taking office in 2012, Abevisited the Yasukuni Shrine, which honours Japan’s war dead — including war criminals from the World War II era. Although he largely avoided further visits, he resisted calls for Japan to more fully apologise for its wartime atrocities, a sore point with its neighbours South Korea and China.

Under his watch, Japan’srelations with South Korea fell to one of their lowest points since Japan’s colonial occupation of the peninsula, with the two countries arguing over how Japan should atone for its history.

When Abe gave the first speech by a Japanese Prime Minister to the US Congress in 2015, he acknowledged the weight of the past but avoided a direct personal apology for Japan’s role in the war.

“History is harsh. What is done cannot be undone,” he said. “Our actions brought suffering to the peoples in Asian countries. We must not avert our eyes from that.”

On what was the 70th anniversary of the end of the war, he reiterated his support for past official statements of remorse, but also seemed to suggest that Japan had done enough. “We must not let our children, grandchildren, and even further generations tocome, who have nothing to do with that war, be predestined to apologise,” he said.

Shinzo Abe was born on September 21, 1954, in Tokyo to Shintaro and Yoko Abe. His mother was the daughter of Nobusuke Kishi, who had been accused of war crimes by the occupying Americans, but who was ultimately released from prison without appearing before the Allied war crimes tribunal. He served as Prime Minister from 1957 to 1960 and ardently opposed the Constitution that his grandson, half a century later, would try to revise.

Abe’s father also went into politics, serving as foreign minister and as an influential leader in the Liberal Democratic Party, which has governed Japan for all but four years since the end of the war. There was perhaps little question that Abe would eventually follow his father and grandfather into politics.

New York Times News Service