The builder of a dynasty

Abe Yōko, 1928-2024

The Abe family in 1956: clockwise from upper left, Yōko, Shintarō, Hironobu, and Shinzō. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

In June 1950, a purged wartime politician arranged a meeting for his daughter with a young reporter at the Mainichi Shimbun. The politician, Kishi Nobusuke, had been imprisoned by the US Occupation as an accused war criminal for his part in Tōjō Hideki’s wartime cabinet, and, as he looked to the postwar era, he saw that newspapermen would be important players in a more democratic age – and thought a reporter might make a suitable match for his twenty-two-year-old daughter, Yōko.

The reporter, Abe Shintarō, was no stranger to politics. His father, Abe Kan, was a local politician and Diet member, like Kishi hailing from Yamaguchi prefecture at the western end of Honshu. They met for the first time at a French restaurant in Shibuya and began courting; they married the following May. By 1953, with the Occupation-era purges lifted following the restoration of sovereignty in 1952, Kishi was back in the Diet. He would be an instrumental player in ousting Yoshida Shigeru from the premiership in 1954; forging rival conservative parties into the Liberal Democratic Party in 1955; and, after an unsuccessful bid for the LDP’s leadership and a brief stint as foreign minister, would ascend to the premiership in 1957. Shintarō, meanwhile, would leave Mainichi to serve as Kishi’s private secretary in 1956, and in 1958 defied his father-in-law to launch a successful bid for a House of Representatives seat from Yamaguchi.

While her father and husband were building their careers in the nascent LDP, Yōko was busy as a mother, bearing three sons, two of whom would ensure that the Abe-Kishi dynasty’s power would extend well into the next century. Her eldest, Hironobu, born in 1952, would spurn politics and went on to have a successful career at the Mitsubishi Corporation. Her second, Shinzō, born in 1954, would become Japan’s longest-serving prime minister. And her youngest, Nobuo, born in 1959, would be adopted by Yōko’s childless brother and sister-in-law and be raised as a Kishi, serving in both houses of the Diet over nineteen years before stepping down in favor of his son Nobuchiyo in 2023.

After seventy years of forging a political dynasty, Abe Yōko died on 4 February 2024 at the age of 95.

--

Yōko’s role in the building of the dynasty did not end with the birth of her children. She was an active presence on the campaign trail for both her father and husband, delivering speeches, meeting voters, and organizing supporters’ groups, particularly women’s auxiliaries or “housewives” groups. Indeed, she would often focus on these duties at the expense of parenting, traveling to Yamaguchi to meet with constituencies if Shintarō was busy during a parliamentary session. Abe Shinzō, it was said, “grew up in a house without parents.” He recalled feeling a sense of longing for “a normal family.” Yōko would describe the family as a “community of independent states.” This unusual childhood, spent in the company of nannies and tutors (and sometimes their grandfather) was the price paid by Yōko’s children for the family’s ambitions.¹

In time, Yōko would emerge as – in the term favored by the tabloids – “the godmother” of one of Japan’s most powerful political dynasties. She would spur her husband to ever-higher office, indeed, to the brink of the premiership before scandal denied him the LDP’s leadership and cancer ended his life in 1991, aged sixty-seven. She defended Kishi Nobusuke’s reputation, and impressed upon Shinzō, Shintarō’s heir apparent, the importance of following in Kishi’s footsteps. She would play no small part in shaping her son’s beliefs as he embarked upon a political career of his own following his father’s death. “The LDP of the present was made by my father Kishi Nobusuke,” she told him, “and you must never forget those great footprints.”² Shinzō would remain close to her throughout his life. Even as prime minister, he continued to live in the home he shared with her in Shibuya’s Tomigaya neighborhood, joining her for breakfast before commuting to the prime minister’s office for the day.

--

By all accounts, Yōko was a formidable figure in her own right. While she advanced the family’s interests, there are plenty of hints that she was clear-eyed about political power. Perhaps one of the more revealing episodes I found while writing The Iconoclast was her assessment of her late husband’s failure to secure the LDP leadership and the premiership in protracted negotiations with Takeshita Noboru over who would succeed Nakasone Yasuhiro.

After [Shintarō’s] death, his wife Yōko criticized her late husband for his idealism. “There is more to the world than ideals,” she told the Mainichi Shimbun. “Meanwhile, I guess you can say to a certain extent, ‘strength’—I think it would have been better if he had had that. But that was his personality…”³

She also fretted over Shinzō’s political career. She worried about his health – which twice forced him to resign the premiership. When he was named LDP secretary-general in 2003, only ten years into his career, she was surprised that he was being given so weighty a responsibility at so young an age, and also openly opposed his decision to seek the LDP’s leadership again in 2012. She would at times spar with Shinzō’s wife Akie, wondering whether she was fulfilling the duties of a political wife. In her final years, she was deeply involved in debates within the family over how to manage the transition to the next generation following Shinzō’s death and Nobuo’s retirement.

In short, she was utterly unsentimental when it came to the political fortunes and future of the dynasty, and, in a different age, might have been the family’s standard bearer herself instead of exerting herself on behalf of the political careers of her father, her husband, and her sons.

--

At the time of Yōko’s death, it is very much in doubt whether her political project – the persistence of the Abe-Kishi family as the bearer of her father’s ideals into the future – outlasts her. The Abe faction, the last political institution bearing her husband’s and son’s name, is in the midst of being dissolved amidst a massive financial scandal. For the first time since 1958 – with the exception of a short period in the 1960s when Shintarō lost his seat – there is no Abe in the Diet and there is little sign that Akie will run herself or adopt an heir or that Abe Hironobu’s children will enter politics. The family’s political future rests, it seems, on Kishi Nobuchiyo.

But perhaps there is a symmetry to this story. When Yōko met Shintarō, she was the daughter of an accused war criminal struggling to reenter politics; he was the orphaned son of a notable but deceased prewar politician whose name was receding into the past. There was little to suggest that the family would yield some of the most influential figures of the postwar era. Now, after three generations of prominence and power, the dynasty is once again rebuilding from a single parliamentary seat in Yamaguchi prefecture.

---

Coming soon: subscriptions!

As always, many thanks to those who have already signed up to read these posts. Having decided to remain on Substack, I have also decided that I am going to shift to a subscription model in the coming weeks. I will provide more information soon, but in the meantime, if you are prepared to subscribe, it would be helpful if you could press the “pledge your support” button on the upper right of the page.

Stay tuned for more information on my plans for what comes next.

1. Shinzō and Hironobu also had to keep the secret of Nobuo’s birth secret from their “cousin” for years.

2. She often said that her son combined her father’s politics with her husband’s personality.

3. The Iconoclast, p. 37.