ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Abe’s foreign policy can be understood as a response to the international environment between 2006 and 2012. Increasing Chinese global influence, leadership change and newly assertive behavior, tense US-China relations, and developments around the Korean Peninsula can be identified as influential factors. To support these claims, this essay analyzes Abe’s changed foreign political behavior with a special focus on his approach toward the People’s Republic within the framework of changes in Japan’s international environment from an international relations perspective. In 2006, Shinzô Abe first became Japanese Prime Minister and chose China for his first official state visit. Moreover, he refrained from visiting Yasukuni Shrine during his first cabinet (2006–2007) to avoid Sino-Japanese political frictions. However, during Abe’s second cabinet, from 2012 to the present, it took until 2018 for him to visit China to meet Chinese leader Jinping Xi after having visited over 50 other countries to increase international cooperation. Abe also visited Yasukuni Shrine in 2013, thus showing his unwillingness to pay special consideration to relations with China this time. Nevertheless, in 2018 he agreed to host the Japan-China High-Level Economic Dialogue and the Japan-China-South Korea Trilateral Summit. The analysis draws on theoretical findings by Amako (2013), Jervis (2017), and others and uses MOFA documents, texts, and foreign policy statements published by Abe.
