page_title: Shinzo Abe
section_title: Security and defense issues
hierarchical_section_title: Shinzo Abe / Third term as prime minister (2014–2017) / Security and defense issues
caption_attribution_description: Русский: Встреча Президента России Владимира Путина с Премьер-министром Японии Синдзо Абэ
context_page_description: Shinzo Abe is a Japanese politician who has served four terms as Prime Minister of Japan and President of the Liberal Democratic Party since 2012, and previously from 2006 to 2007. He also served as Chief Cabinet Secretary from 2005 to 2006 and was Leader of the Opposition in 2012. He is the longest-serving Prime Minister in Japanese history.
  Abe was elected to the House of Representatives in the 1993 election. He was appointed Chief Cabinet Secretary by Junichiro Koizumi in September 2005, before going on to replace Koizumi as LDP President in September 2006. He was subsequently confirmed as Prime Minister of Japan by a special session of the National Diet, becoming, aged 52, Japan's youngest post-war Prime Minister, and the first to have been born after World War II. Abe resigned as Prime Minister after one year in office, citing ulcerative colitis, shortly after his party lost that year's House of Councillors election. He was replaced by Yasuo Fukuda, the first in a series of five prime ministers who each failed to retain office for more than sixteen months.
context_section_description: In his April speech to Congress, Abe announced that his government would "enact all necessary bills by this coming summer" to expand the Self-Defense Forces' capacity for operations and to give effect to the cabinet's July 2014 decision to re-interpret the constitution in favor of collective self-defense. Therefore, the Abe cabinet introduced 11 bills making up the "Peace and Security Preservation Legislation" into the Diet in May 2015, which pushed for a limited expansion of military powers to fight in a foreign conflict. The principal aims of the bills were to allow Japan's Self-Defense Forces to come to the aid of allied nations under attack (even if Japan itself was not), to expand their scope to support international peacekeeping operations, and to allow for Japan to take on a greater share of security responsibilities as part of the US-Japan Alliance.
  In order to allow for enough time to pass the bills in the face of lengthy opposition scrutiny, the Abe cabinet extended the Diet session by 95 days from June into September, making it the longest in the post-war era. The bills passed the House of Representatives on 16 July with the support of the majority LDP-Komeito coalition. Diet members from the opposition Democratic, Innovation, Communist and Social Democratic parties walked out of the vote in protest at what they said was the government's move to force the bills through without sufficient debate and ignore "responsible opposition parties". Abe countered by arguing that the bills had been debated for "as many as 113 hours" before the vote. While common practice in many other parliamentary democracies, a government using its majority to "railroad" controversial bills through the Diet in the face of political and public opposition is a subject of criticism in Japan.
  As a result of these moves, Abe faced a public backlash, and opinion polls showed that his approval ratings fell into negative figures for the first time since he returned to power in 2012, with 50 percent disapproving and 38 percent approving of the cabinet according to one Nikkei survey at the beginning of August. Many protested the legislation outside the Diet buildings, denouncing what was referred to as "war bills" by opponents. Organizers of the protests estimated that up to 100,000 protesters marched against the bills' passage of the lower house in July. During Diet committee hearings on the bills, constitutional scholars (some of whom had been invited by the ruling parties) and a former supreme court justice argued that the legislation was unconstitutional. Abe was publicly criticised by atomic bomb survivor Sumiteru Taniguchi in his speech at the Nagasaki memorial ceremony on 9 August, when he stated that the defense reforms would take Japan "back to the wartime period". Members of the Abe cabinet said that they would make a greater effort to explain the contents of and the reasons for the security legislation to the public, with the LDP releasing an animated cartoon commercial, and Abe appearing live on television and internet chat streams to make the case for the legislation and take questions from members of the public.
  The security bills were finally approved 148 votes to 90 by the House of Councillors and became law on 19 September, following opposition attempts at delaying tactics and physical altercations in which some Diet members attempted to stop the relevant chairman calling the vote to move the bill out of committee and to a general vote. After the vote, Abe issued a statement saying that the new laws "will fortify our pledge to never again wage war", and that the legislation, rather than being "war bills", was instead "aimed at deterring war and contributing to peace and security". He also pledged to continue to explain the legislation to try to gain "greater understanding" from the public on the issue. Following the bills' passage, Abe was expected to once again return his focus to economic issues.
  On 18 October 2015 Abe presided over the triennial fleet review of the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force in his role as Commander-in-
caption: Abe and Russian President Vladimir Putin in November 2016. Japan has not yet signed a peace treaty with Russia to end World War II because of a Kuril Islands dispute
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