Dr. Tomohiko Taniguchi | Former Japan PM Shinzo Abe’s Principal Foreign Policy Speech Writer | Currently Special Adviser, Fujitsu Future Studies Centre, Japan |
Statesmen are usually measured by the visible architecture of public life: elections won, reforms attempted, alliances forged, crises survived and strategic choices made. Japan’s former Prime Minister ABE Shinzo will long be judged by those standards. Yet having had the good fortune to work closely with him, I remember something less measurable, but no less consequential: his rare ability to make each person before him feel seen, respected and valued.
One memory captures that quality with unusual force.
On 16 September 2020, after resigning because of ill health before completing his term, Prime Minister Abe left the Prime Minister’s Office for the last time. Senior officials and staff filled the entrance hall of the Kantei, Japan’s equivalent of the Prime Minister’s Office. The country was still living under the shadow of Covid, and almost everyone wore masks. Two young women stepped forward without masks to present him with a large bouquet. The video from that day shows his profile as he received it: gentle, grateful, almost luminous.
The applause would not stop. Yet as I stood by the entrance, I felt a small anger rising within me. Was applause all we could offer? Why was everyone silent?
I had anticipated that possibility. I had placed myself there for the final moment. And so, with all the strength I had, in a voice that rang through the Kantei, I shouted: “Prime Minister -thank you!”
For an instant, Abe’s composure gave way. His eyes reddened slightly. Then he walked out. With him went a rhythm of life that had shaped my days for seven years and eight months. I returned my pass, cleared my office and left the building with an emptiness I can still feel.
Yet resignation did not end my work with him. From time to time, without warning, my phone would ring. The screen would show four characters in Japanese: “A-be-so-ri” – Prime Minister Abe. Our family once had a large Golden Retriever, and whenever those characters appeared, I thought of that dog’s tail. If I had had such a tail, it would have wagged so hard it might have come off.
“Ah, it is Abe Shinzo speaking,” he would say, oddly modest even though his name needed no introduction.
I knew what was coming: work. A speech, a message, a thought to be shaped for the world. He would ask almost apologetically whether I might help with “something that may be coming up.” I never let him finish. “Of course,” I would say. “Of course I will.”
At once the adrenaline returned. Another all-nighter perhaps. But it never felt like a burden. It was a privilege to write for a leader who spoke to the world with the dignity of an incomparable tenor. In every region, including India, where his “Confluence of the Two Seas” address before Parliament helped open the intellectual path to the Indo-Pacific, he won respect, trust and friendship. To Indian readers, this is not remote history. Abe saw India not as a useful counterweight on a diplomatic chessboard, but as a civilisational partner, a democracy of weight and memory, indispensable to the balance of Asia.
What explains that power?
Strategy mattered. Interests mattered. Security calculations mattered. Yet they do not fully explain why so many leaders, across democracies and authoritarian systems alike, genuinely looked forward to seeing him. The answer, I think, lay in his gaze.
When Mrs. ABE Akie once asked me what I remembered most about her husband, I hesitated to name one episode. Then the answer came: his eyes. His gaze was warm without calculation, confident without arrogance, attentive without pretence. It made the person before him feel that he mattered. In politics, that is not a small thing. It is often the beginning of trust, and sometimes of friendship.
This was true not only of colleagues and friends at home. It was also true of foreign leaders of formidable temper and size. Some seemed like great beasts of power—men who pounded their chests, embraced him with crushing force, or displayed walls covered with weapons. Yet they, too, welcomed “Shinzo” with unmistakable pleasure. Perhaps his gaze quietly disarmed them. Perhaps it let them remove, for a moment, the armour around their hearts.
In that sense, Abe resembled the nineteenth-century teacher and patriot YOSHIDA Shoin, whom he always called “Shoin Sensei.” Shoin died at only twenty-nine, yet those touched by him never ceased to revere him. His authority came not from office but from character. Abe, too, drew loyalty not by demanding it, but by earning it.
Historians will continue to debate Abe’s economics, constitutional ambitions and diplomacy. They may never fully explain the personal bonds he formed, including those with leaders as difficult as Vladimir Putin. Politics is conducted by people, for people, and people respond not only to policies but to character.
Four years after his death, my gratitude remains simple. I was blessed to know a leader whose greatness lay not only in statecraft, but in the humanity he brought to power. He made others feel they mattered. And for that, Prime Minister Abe, thank you.
[ Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe died on July 8, 2022, following an assassination during election campaign. ]
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