Shinzo Abe

Shinzo Abe is the current Prime Minister of Japan. Hailing from a politically influential family, he joined politics at a very early age. Starting his career as the private secretary to the chairperson of the General Council of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), he himself was elected as the President of the party and Prime Minister of Japan within two and half decades.

He always had a nationalistic approach and worked to rewrite Japan’s history when he was still a junior member of the House of Representatives. When he became the leader of LDP for the second time, the first thing he did was to pay a visit to the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, which is a memorial to the soldiers who died in the World War II.

Since many of those dead were later identified as war criminals, it created an international furor. However, Abe was not deterred by that. Instead, he has gone on to pursue an independent foreign policy and even reinterpreted the post war constitution so as to strengthen the country’s defense system.

• Shinzo Abe was born on September 21, 1954, in Tokyo, Japan. However, his registered residence is in Nagato of Yamaguchi Prefecture, where his family had lived for generations.
• Shinzo’s father Shintaro Abe was the longest serving post war foreign minister of Japan and a leading member of the Liberal Democratic Party. His mother Yoko Kishi was the daughter of Nobosuke Kishi, the former Prime Minister of Japan