The life of Shinzo Abe

With his maternal grandfather, a former prime minister, and his father a seasoned politician, Shinzo had inherited a strong family lineage in Japanese politics.

In 1944, Shintaro Abe finished his graduation and joined a naval aviation school with the hope of becoming a kamikaze pilot. But before he could complete his training, Japan had lost the war to the US.

In the next few years, Shintaro pursued law at Tokyo University, tried his hand in journalism, got married to the daughter of a prominent politician, and gradually started walking the corridors of power in Tokyo.

The coming decades would see Shintaro grow in stature in Japanese politics. He’d work closely with his father-in-law, Nobusuke Kishi, who became Prime Minister of Japan in 1957.

Shintaro would go on to become Japan’s foreign minister in 1982 and was tipped to be the prime minister of Japan at some point in the future. However, destiny had other plans. Shintaro died in 1991 of heart failure (there were murmurs he had cancer), leaving behind his wife and two sons, Hironobu and Shinzo.

While Hironobu chose the path to become an entrepreneur, Shinzo carried his father’s legacy forward by joining politics and eventually achieved what his father couldn’t and became Prime Minister of Japan. With his maternal grandfather, a former prime minister, and his father a seasoned politician, Shinzo had inherited a strong family lineage in Japanese politics.

He was first elected to Parliament in 1993 on his father’s seat, who had passed away a couple of years earlier. In 2000, Shinzo Abe became the deputy chief secretary of the Liberal Democratic Party. He travelled with the then Prime Minister, Junichiro Koizumi, to North Korea in a bid to negotiate the release of Japanese citizens abducted by Kim Jong Il’s regime.

Abe holds the record of being the longest-serving Japanese Prime Minister. He served as Prime Minister of Japan from 2006 to 2007 and again from 2012 to 2020. He was victorious in six electoral contests since 2012.