Abe Shinzo believed that Japan should assert itself in the world

Several years ago, when he was interviewed for The Economist, Abe Shinzo was asked whether he saw himself as a Choshu revolutionary. After all, he was from Yamaguchi, the prefecture in south-western Japan that covered the old Choshu domain; his father, once foreign minister, had represented the region, and after 1993 he had held that seat himself. It was the samurai of Choshu who, in the mid-19th century, realised that if Japan did not overhaul its institutions, its army and its economy, it would be swallowed up by the West. They helped both to bring down the weary Tokugawa shogunate and to push through the Meiji Restoration that transformed and modernised Japan.

Did he see himself that way? He liked the question. He was proud of being from Choshu, and of what his forebears had done. Of course, they had wanted to keep foreigners out; but they were also people of wide horizons, who knew that Japan had to catch up, fast. They had risked their lives to achieve it.