How bad could it get? America’s ugly election

A bug’s life

Tales from the Ant World.

By Edward

Wilson. 

Liveright; 240 pages; $26.95 

and £17.99

Anty matter

A

be shinzo

was just five years old in

1960 when protesters surrounded his

grandfather’s house in Tokyo. Kishi Nobu-

suke, then Japan’s prime minister, was in

the midst of a pitched battle over Japan’s

security treaty with America. Kishi would

get his treaty that year, though it led to him

losing power. For a young Mr Abe, the epi-

sode would be “the touchstone of his polit-

ical identity”, argues Tobias Harris in “The

Iconoclast”, a new biography of Japan’s lon-

gest-serving prime minister.

Mr Abe’s status as the grandson of a for-

mer prime minister and the son of a former

foreign minister, Abe Shintaro, is well-

known. Mr Harris, a longtime observer of

Japanese politics, astutely explains how Mr

Abe’s family influenced his thinking, and

situates that thinking in the broader con-

text of Japanese history stretching back to

the Meiji restoration of 1868. This compre-

hensive and engaging tome may become

the definitive English-language portrait of

Mr Abe, made all the more relevant by his

recent resignation (see Asia section).

As Mr Harris shows, Mr Abe is the pro-

geny of Kishi, but a product of the Ameri-

can occupation and the many strange com-

promises it engendered. His grandfather’s

fate is one of the most striking. Kishi made

his name orchestrating forced labour for

the Japanese war machine as a minister in

Japanese-occupied Manchuria in the 1930s.

He served loyally in Japan’s wartime cabi-

net and was arrested as a war criminal in

1945. As the cold war ramped up, Kishi was

one of several ex-leaders the Americans let

off in order to help rebuild Japan as a bul-

wark against Soviet communism. Kishi

climbed to the pinnacle of power in Japan

by helping to found the Liberal Democratic

Party (

ldp

) with a bit of help from the 

cia

.

Re-establishing Japan’s sovereignty and

seeking greater equality in the partnership

with America became Kishi’s mission. But

in the battle of post-war ideas, his vision

lost out to the “Yoshida Doctrine” (so

named after Japan’s first significant post-

war prime minister, Yoshida Shigeru),

wherein Japan would rely upon America

for security while focusing on its own eco-

nomic development. Mr Abe made it his

cause to revise that consensus, embodied

in the American-imposed post-war consti-

tution that bars Japan from having armed

forces (though it does, with American sup-

port, maintain mighty armed forces for the 

Abe Shinzo