title: Shinzo Abe

text: In Autumn 2013, Abe decided to proceed with the first stage of the increase in the consumption tax from 5 to 8 percent in April 2014 (with a second stage envisaged raising it to 10 percent in October 2015). The bill to raise the tax had been passed under the previous DPJ government, but the final decision lay with the Prime Minister. He and Finance Minister Tarō Asō explained that the tax would be increased to provide a "sustainable" basis for future social spending and to avoid the need to finance future stimulus by issuing government bonds. While this was expected to affect economic growth in the quarter following the rise, Abe also announced a 5-trillion yen stimulus package that aimed to mitigate any effects on economic revival. After the increase in April, Japan fell into recession during the second and third quarters of 2014, leading to Abe delaying the second stage of the tax rise until April 2017 and calling a snap election . In response to the recession, Aso announced that the government would ask the Diet to pass a supplementary budget to fund a further stimulus package worth 2–3 trillion yen.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: There had been some division within the Abe cabinet between "fiscal hawks", such as Finance Minister Aso, who favored fiscal consolidation through spending cuts and tax increases, and deflationists, such as Abe himself, who argued in favor of a "growth first" policy that prioritizes economic expansion and recovery over budget considerations using the slogan "no fiscal health without economic revitalization". Abe's decision to delay the consumption tax increase in November 2014 and his push for a large fiscal deficit in the 2015 budget without social security cuts was interpreted as a victory for this faction within the LDP. The government did, however, commit to a primary surplus by 2020, and pledged to review its strategy in 2018 if the primary deficit had not fallen to 1 percent of GDP by that time.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: On 15 March 2013, Abe announced that Japan was entering negotiations to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). This was interpreted by analysts as a means through which the government could enact reforms to liberalize certain sectors of the Japanese economy, most notably agriculture, and was criticized by farm lobbies and some sections of the LDP. Economist Yoshizaki Tatsuhiko described the TPP as having the potential to act as the "linchpin of Abe's economic revitalization strategy" by making Japan more competitive through free trade. In February 2015 the Abe government struck a deal to limit the power of the JA-Zenchu body to supervise and audit Japan's agricultural co-operatives, in a move designed to facilitate TPP negotiations, improve the competitiveness of Japan's farming sector and curtail the influence of the agriculture lobby.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: Abe revealed the first measures related to the "third arrow" policies in June 2013, which included plans to establish deregulated economic zones and allow the sale of drugs online, but did not include substantial measures related to the labor market or business reform. These measures were less well-received than the first two arrows had been since Abe took office, with the stock market falling slightly and critics arguing that they lacked detail; "The Economist", for example, judged the announcement a "misfire". Analysts did note, however, that Abe was waiting until after the July Upper House elections to reveal further details, to avoid an adverse reaction by voters to potentially unpopular reforms. At the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos in 2014 Abe announced that he was ready to act as a "drill bit" to break through the rock of vested interests and "red tape" to achieve structural reforms of the economy. He cited reforms in agriculture, energy and health sectors as evidence of this, and pledged to push forward with the TPP, a Japan–EU trade deal and tax, corporate governance and planning reforms.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: Abe announced a package of structural reforms in June 2014, that "The Economist" described as "less a single arrow than a 1,000-strong bundle" and compared favorably to the 2013 announcement. These new measures included corporate governance reform, the easing of restrictions on hiring foreign staff in special economic zones, liberalizing the health sector, and measures to help foreign and local entrepreneurs. The plans also included a cut in corporation tax to below 30 percent, an expansion of childcare to encourage women to join the workforce, and the loosening of restrictions on overtime. In December 2015, the government announced corporation tax would be reduced to 29.97 percent in 2016, bringing the cut forward one year ahead of schedule.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: In September 2013 Abe called for a "society in which all women can shine", setting a target that 30 percent of leadership positions should be held by women by 2020. Abe cited the "womenomics" ideas of Kathy Matsui that greater participation by women in the workforce, which is relatively low in Japan, especially in leadership roles, could improve Japan's GDP and potentially fertility rates, despite declining population figures. The Abe cabinet introduced measures to expand childcare and legislation to force public and private organizations to publish data on the number of women they employ, and what positions they hold.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: In November 2013 the Abe cabinet passed a bill to liberalize Japan's electricity market by abolishing price controls, breaking up regional monopolies, and separating power transmission from generation by creating a national grid company. This move was partly in response to the 2011 Fukushima disaster, and the bill faced little opposition in the Diet. By March 2015, more than 500 companies had applied to the Economy Ministry to enter the electricity retail market and the electricity industry was expected to be fully liberalized by 2016, with gas utilities expected to follow suit by 2017. Abe had also said he favored the re-building of Japan's nuclear reactors following the Fukushima disaster (though much of the authority to restart nuclear plants lies with local governments) and planned to strengthen relations with the United States.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: In 2013 the Eurekahedge Japan Hedge Fund Index posted a record 28-percent return, which was credited to the unprecedented actions of the Abe government. In July 2015 the IMF reported that, while the structural reforms had "modestly" improved growth prospects, "further high-impact structural reforms are needed to lift growth" and prevent over-reliance on yen depreciation.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: When Abe returned to office, although neither party had controlled the House of Councillors (the upper house of the Diet) since the 2007 election, the opposition DPJ was the largest party. The governing coalition enjoyed a two-thirds majority in the lower house, allowing it to override the upper house's veto, but this requires a delay of 90 days. This situation, known as the "Twisted Diet", had contributed to political gridlock and the "revolving door" of prime ministers since 2007. Abe's campaign for the 2013 election focused on themes of economic revival, asking voters to give him a stable mandate in both houses to pursue reforms, and took a more moderate tone on defense and constitutional matters.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: In the 2013 upper house election, the LDP emerged as the largest party with 115 seats (a gain of 31) and the Komeito with 20 (a gain of 1), giving Abe's coalition control of both houses of the Diet, but not the two-thirds majority in the upper house that would allow for constitutional revision. With no national elections due until 2016, this result was described as giving Abe the opportunity of "three golden years" of parliamentary stability in which to implement his policies.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: Abe's return to the prime ministership saw a renewed attempt to downplay Japan's wartime atrocities in school textbooks, an issue that had contributed to his earlier downfall. In 2013, Abe supported the creation of the Top Global University Project program. This is a ten-year program to increase international student attendance in Japanese universities and hire more foreign faculty. There is also funding for selected universities to create English-only undergraduate programs.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: In 2014, Abe allocated millions of dollars of the fiscal budget to help programs that help single individuals in Japan find potential mates. These programs entitled "Marriage support programs" were started in hopes of raising Japan's declining birthrate which was half of what it was six decades prior.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: Shortly after taking office Abe signaled a "drastic reshaping" of foreign policy and promised to pursue diplomacy with a global, rather than a regional or bilateral outlook based on "the fundamental values of freedom, democracy, basic human rights, and the rule of law". His choice of Fumio Kishida as foreign minister was interpreted as a sign that he would pursue a more moderate line compared to his hawkish stance in the run-up to the general election. His first visit overseas after becoming prime minister once again was to various countries in Southeast Asia. Abe increased its allies in its international campaign to counter a North Korean nuclear threat. Abe often visited countries such as Singapore, Japan's largest Asian investor and vice-versa.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: Within weeks of returning to power, the Second Abe cabinet faced the In Amenas hostage crisis of 2013 in which 10 Japanese citizens were killed. Abe condemned the killings as "absolutely unforgivable" and confirmed that Japan and Britain had co-operated over the incident. Abe believed that this incident demonstrated the need for the creation of a Japanese National Security Council , and convened a panel to consider its creation soon after the crisis.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: Abe was unusually active in the field of foreign affairs for a Japanese prime minister, making visits to 49 countries between December 2012 and September 2014, a number that was described as "unprecedented" (by contrast, his immediate two predecessors Naoto Kan and Yoshihiko Noda visited a combined total of 18 countries between June 2010 and December 2012). This was interpreted as a means to offset poor relations with the PRC and the Koreas by increasing Japan's profile on the world stage and improving bilateral ties with other countries in the region. Southeast Asian nations, Australia, and India were significant and frequent destinations for Abe, who visited all 10 ASEAN countries in his first year in office. The diplomatic tours also functioned as another element of Abenomics by promoting Japan to the international business community and opening up avenues for trade, energy, and defense procurement deals (for example, business executives often travel with Abe on these visits).


title: Shinzo Abe

text: In September 2013, Abe intervened to aid Tokyo's bid to host the 2020 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games, giving a speech in English at the IOC session in Buenos Aires, in which he extolled the role of sport in Japan and sought to reassure the committee that any ongoing issues with the Fukushima plant were under control. After the bid was successful, Abe sought to portray the games as symbolic of his Abenomics economic revitalization programme, saying, "I want to make the Olympics a trigger for sweeping away 15 years of deflation and economic decline." In 2014 he said that he hoped a "robot olympics" would be held at the same time, to promote the robotics industry.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: Abe's foreign policy moved Japan away from its traditional focus on the "big three" bilateral relationships with the United States, PRC, and South Korea, and sought to increase Japan's international profile by expanding ties with NATO, the European Union, and other organizations beyond the Asia-Pacific region. In 2014, Abe and British prime minister David Cameron agreed to establish a "2 + 2 framework" of annual consultations between the British and Japanese foreign and defense ministries, with Abe calling for greater co-operation on issues "from peace of the seas to the security of the skies, space and cyberspace". This followed a similar agreement with French ministers in Tokyo earlier in the year.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: Abe concluded the Japan–Australia Economic Partnership Agreement with Australia's Abbott government in 2014 and addressed a joint sitting of the Australian Parliament in July. In heralding the agreement, he also offered condolences for the suffering of Australians during World War II – singling out the Kokoda Track campaign and Sandakan Death Marches.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: In January 2014, Abe became the first Japanese leader to attend India's Republic Day Parade in Delhi as chief guest, during a three-day visit where he and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh agreed to increase co-operation over economic, defense and security issues and signed trade agreements related to energy, tourism and telecoms. A close relationship was anticipated between Abe and Narendra Modi after the latter's election as Prime Minister of India in May 2014, when it was noted that they had established ties from at least seven years previously when Modi was still Chief Minister of Gujarat and that Modi was one of three people Abe "followed" on Twitter. The two men exchanged congratulatory messages after the election. Modi made his first major foreign visit to Japan in autumn of 2014, where he and Abe discussed agreements on nuclear co-operation, rare-earth elements, and joint maritime exercises. During the visit Abe invited Modi to become the first Indian leader to stay at the Imperial State Guest House in Kyoto.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: On 30 May 2014, Abe told officials from the ASEAN countries, the United States, and Australia, that Japan wanted to play a major role in maintaining regional security, a departure from the passiveness it has displayed since World War II. He offered Japan's support to other countries in resolving territorial disputes.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: Relations between Japan and its immediate neighbors, the PRC and South Korea, remained poor after Abe's return to office. While he declared that the "doors are always open on my side", no bilateral meetings between Abe and the PRC leadership took place for the first 23 months of his second term. Neither did Abe hold any meetings with President Park Geun-hye of South Korea during his 2012 to 2014 term of office. Both countries criticized Abe's visit to the Yasukuni Shrine in December 2013, with the PRC'S Foreign Minister describing the action as moving Japan in an "extremely dangerous" direction. In addition the PRC continued to criticize Abe's defense reform policies, warning that Japan should not abandon its post-war policy of pacifism. Abe's speech at the WEF in 2014 was interpreted as a criticism of PRC foreign and defense policy when he said that "the dividends of growth in Asia must not be wasted on military expansion" and called for greater preservation of the freedom of the seas under the rule of law, although he did not specifically refer to any one country during his remarks.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: In November 2014, Abe met PRC president Xi Jinping at the APEC meeting in Beijing for the first time since either had taken office, after a photocall that was described as "awkward" by the press. Abe later told reporters that during the meeting he suggested establishing a hotline between Tokyo and Beijing to help resolve any maritime clashes and that the "first step" had been taken to improve relations.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: Abe tried to centralize security policy in the Prime Minister's office by creating the National Security Council to better coordinate national security policy, and by ordering the first National Security Strategy in Japan's history. Based upon the American body of the same name, the law to create the NSC was passed in November 2013 and began operating the following month when Abe appointed Shotaro Yachi as Japan's first National Security Advisor.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: In December 2013, Abe announced a five-year plan of military expansion. He described this as "proactive pacificism", with the goal of making Japan a more "normal" country, able to defend itself. This was in reaction to a PRC buildup and a decreased American influence in the region.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: In the same month, the Diet passed the Abe cabinet's State Secrecy Law, which took effect in December 2014. The law expanded the scope for the government to designate what information constitutes a state secret and increased penalties for bureaucrats and journalists who leak such information to up to 10 years in prison and a 10-million-yen fine. The passage of the law proved controversial, with thousands protesting the bill in Tokyo and the cabinet's approval rating falling below 50 percent for the first time in some polls. Detractors argued that the law was ambiguous and therefore gave the government too much freedom to decide which information to classify, that it could curtail freedom of the press, and that the cabinet had rushed the legislation without including any corresponding freedom of information guarantees. Abe argued that the law was necessary and applied only in cases of national security, diplomacy, public safety and counter-terrorism, saying, "If the law prevents films from being made, or weakens freedom of the press, I'll resign." However he did concede that, in retrospect, the government should have explained the details of the bill more carefully to the public.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: In July 2014 the Abe cabinet decided to re-interpret Japan's constitution to allow for the right of "Collective Self-Defense". This would allow the Self Defense Forces to come to the aid of, and defend, an ally under attack, whereas the previous interpretation of the constitution was strictly pacifist and allowed for the force to be used only in absolute self-defence. The decision was supported by the United States, which has argued for greater scope for action by Japan as a regional ally, and led to a revision of the US-Japan defense cooperation guidelines in 2015. In response the PRC Foreign Ministry said the decision "raised doubts" about Japan's commitment to peace, and argued that the Japanese public is opposed to the concept of collective self-defense. Abe argued that the move would not lead to Japan becoming involved in "foreign wars" such as the Gulf or Iraq War, but instead would secure peace through deterrence. This led to the introduction of the 2015 security legislation to give legal effect to the cabinet's decision .


title: Shinzo Abe

text: The cabinet inaugurated in December 2012 was the longest-serving and most stable in post-war Japanese history, lasting 617 days without a change in personnel until Abe conducted a reshuffle in September 2014, with the stated aim of promoting more women into ministerial posts. The reshuffled cabinet tied the record of five women ministers set by the first Koizumi cabinet. Most key figures, such as Deputy Prime Minister Aso and Chief Cabinet Secretary Suga, were kept in their posts although Abe moved Justice Minister Sadakazu Tanigaki out of the cabinet to become Secretary-General of the LDP. However, on 20 October two of the women promoted in the reshuffle, Justice Minister Midori Matsushima and Trade Minister Yūko Obuchi, were forced to resign in separate election finance scandals. Abe told the press, "As prime minister, I bear full responsibility for having appointed them, and I apologize deeply to the people of Japan."


title: Shinzo Abe

text: In November 2014, while Abe was attending the APEC forum meeting in the PRC and the G20 Summit in Australia, rumors began appearing in the press that he was planning to call a snap election in the event that he decided to delay the second stage of the consumption tax increase. It was speculated that Abe planned to do this to "reset" Diet business after it had become gridlocked due to the fallout from ministerial resignations in October, or because the political situation would be less favorable to re-election in 2015 and 2016.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: On 17 November GDP figures were released that showed Japan had fallen into recession as per the two-quarters of negative growth following the first stage of the consumption tax rise in April. Abe held a press conference on 21 November and announced that he was delaying the rise in the consumption tax by 18 months, from October 2015 to April 2017, and calling a snap general election for 14 December. Abe described the election as the "Abenomics Dissolution" and asked the voters to pass judgment on his economic policies. Abe's popularity fell slightly with the announcement and he declared that he would resign if his coalition did not win a simple majority, though analysts agreed this was highly unlikely due to the weak state of the opposition. The opposition parties attempted to field a united front in opposition to Abe's policies, but found themselves divided on them.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: In the elections, the LDP won 291 seats, a loss of 3, but the Komeito gained 4 to win 35. Therefore, the governing coalition maintained its two-thirds majority in a slightly reduced lower house of 475.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: On 24 December 2014 Abe was re-elected to the position of Prime Minister by the House of Representatives. The only change he made when introducing his third cabinet was replacing defense minister Akinori Eto, who was also involved in a political funding controversy, with Gen Nakatani. In his February policy speech, as the Cabinet weathered a Moritomo Gakuen school scandal, Abe called upon the new Diet to enact "most drastic reforms since the end of World War II" in the sectors of the economy, agriculture, healthcare and others.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: On a tour of the Middle East in January 2015, Abe announced that Japan would provide 200 million dollars in non-military assistance to countries fighting against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant as part of a 2.5-billion-dollar aid package. Shortly after this, ISIL released a video in which a masked figure (identified as Mohammed Emwazi or "Jihadi John") threatened to kill two Japanese hostages, Kenji Goto and Haruna Yukawa, in retaliation for the move unless Abe's government paid 200 million dollars of ransom money. Abe cut short his trip to deal with the crisis, declared that such acts of terrorism were "unforgivable" and promised to save the hostages while refusing to pay the ransom. The Abe cabinet worked with the Jordanian government to attempt to secure the release of both hostages, after further videos were released by ISIL linking their fate to that of the pilot Muath al-Kasasbeh, with deputy foreign minister Yasuhide Nakayama conducting negotiations in Amman. Both hostages were killed with ISIL releasing news of Yukawa's death on 24 January and Goto's on 31 January. Abe condemned the killings as a "heinous act", declared that Japan would "not give in to terrorism" and pledged to work with the international community to bring the killers to justice. There was some criticism of Abe for his move to pledge aid against ISIL while they were holding Japanese citizens hostage, but polls showed support for his administration increasing in the aftermath of the crisis. He later used the example of the hostage crisis to argue the case for the collective self-defense legislation that his government introduced in the summer of 2015 .


title: Shinzo Abe

text: In April 2015, Abe addressed a joint session of the United States Congress, the first Japanese prime minister to do so. In his speech he referred to the Japan–US Alliance as the "Alliance of Hope", promised that Japan would play a more active security and defense role in the alliance and argued that the TPP would bring both economic and security benefits to the Asia-Pacific region. The address served as part of a state visit to the United States, the eighth of the Obama Presidency, which President Obama referred to as a "celebration of the ties of friendship" between America and Japan. During the visit, Abe attended a state dinner at the White House.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: Like his predecessors Tomiichi Murayama and Junichiro Koizumi, Abe issued a statement commemorating the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II on 14 August 2015. This statement had been widely anticipated, with some commentators expecting Abe to amend or even refuse to repeat the previous leaders' apologies for Japan's role in the war. In the statement, Abe committed to upholding the previous apologies and expressed "profound grief and eternal, sincere condolences" for the "immeasurable damage and suffering" Japan had caused for "innocent people" during the conflict. He also argued that Japan should not be "predestined to apologize" forever, noting that more than eighty percent of Japanese people alive today were born after the conflict and played no part in it. The governments of both China and South Korea responded with criticism of the statement, but analysts noted that it was muted and restrained in tone, in comparison to the harsher rhetoric than had been employed previously. A representative of the US National Security Council welcomed the statement and referred to Japan as having been a "model for nations everywhere" in its record on "peace, democracy, and the rule of law" since the war's end. Professor Gerald Curtis of Columbia University argued that the statement "probably satisfies no constituency" either in Japan or abroad, but that by repeating the words "aggression", "colonialism", "apology" and "remorse" used in the Murayama Statement of 1995, it was likely to be enough to improve relations with China and Korea.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: In December 2015, Abe and Indian prime minister Narendra Modi signed deals in which India agreed to buy "Shinkansen" technology from Japan (financed in part by a loan from the Japanese government), and for Japan to be raised to full partner status in the Malabar naval exercises. Also agreed at the talks was a proposal for Japan to sell non-military nuclear technology to India, to be formally signed once technical details were finalized. Demonstrating their close relationship, Abe described Modi's policies as "like "Shinkansen"—high speed, safe and reliable while carrying many people along". In return, Modi complimented Abe as a "phenomenal leader", noted how India–Japan relations had a "wonderful human touch" and invited him to attend the "Ganga aarti" ceremony at Dashashwamedh Ghat in his Varanasi constituency. Analysts described the nuclear deal as part of Japan and India's efforts to respond to the growing power of the PRC in the Asia-Pacific region.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: In Seoul in November 2015, Abe attended the first China–Japan–South Korea trilateral summit held for three years with Korean president Park Geun-hye and PRC premier Li Keqiang. The summits had been suspended in 2012 due to tensions over historical and territorial issues. The leaders agreed to restore the summits as annual events, negotiate a trilateral free trade agreement, and work to check North Korea's nuclear weapons programme. They also announced that trilateral co-operation had been "completely restored".


title: Shinzo Abe

text: Japan's relations with South Korea improved somewhat during Abe's third term, in the aftermath of Abe's war anniversary statement. Abe and South Korea's President Park Geun-hye held their first bilateral meeting in November 2015, where they agreed to resolve the "comfort women" dispute, which Park described as the biggest obstacle to closer ties. In late December 2015, foreign ministers Fumio Kishida and Yun Byung-se announced in Seoul that a deal had been reached to resolve the comfort women dispute, in which Japan agreed to pay 1 billion yen (US$8.3 million) into a fund to support the 46 surviving victims, and issued a statement that contained Abe's "most sincere apologies and remorse". Abe later telephoned Park to issue the apology. In return, the South Korean government agreed to consider the matter "finally and irreversibly resolved" and work to remove a statue in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul. Both sides agreed to refrain from criticizing each other over the issue in the future. President Park stated that the agreement would be a "new starting point" for relations between the two countries, although both leaders received some domestic criticism: Abe for issuing the apology, and Park for accepting the deal.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: On 27 May 2016, Abe accompanied Barack Obama when he became the first sitting US president to visit Hiroshima, 71 years after the US atomic bombing of the city towards the end of World War II. The two paid tribute to the victims of the bombing at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, during the visit both leaders pledged to promote nuclear disarmament. Ahead of the visit, Obama said it would "highlight the extraordinary alliance" between Japan and the United States.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: Shortly after Donald Trump had won the US presidential election, Abe cut short his presence at an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit being held in Lima, Peru, in order to have an informal, impromptu meeting with the then president-elect at the Trump Tower. After Trump's inauguration, they had a formal meeting at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, at which they discussed security in light of a North Korean threat, with Abe stating that Japan would be more committed to Japan–United States relations. They also golfed alongside South African professional golfer Ernie Els.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: In his April speech to the US 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. The Abe cabinet then 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.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: 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.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: 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 taken at the beginning of August. Many protested 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 criticized 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.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: The security bills were finally approved by the House of Councillors, 148 votes to 90, and became law on 19 September. This followed opposition attempts using delaying tactics as well as physical altercations, in which some Diet members attempted to stop the relevant chairman from 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.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: On 18 October 2015 Abe presided over the triennial fleet review of the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF) in his role as Commander-in-Chief of the Self-Defense Forces. In his speech to personnel on board the destroyer "Kurama", he announced that "by highly hoisting the flag of 'proactive pacifism,' I'm determined to contribute more than ever to world peace and prosperity". Later that day he went aboard the , becoming the first Japanese prime minister to set foot on an American warship.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: In December 2015, the Abe government announced the creation of a new intelligence unit, the , to aid counter-terrorism operations, to be based in the Foreign Ministry but led by the Prime Minister's Office. This was reported as being part of efforts to step up security measures in preparation for the 2016 G7 Summit in Shima, Mie, and 2020 Olympics in Tokyo. In the same month the cabinet approved Japan's largest-ever defense budget, at 5.1 trillion yen (US$45 billion), for the fiscal year beginning in April 2016. The package included funding intended for the purchase of three "Global Hawk" drones, six F-35 fighter jets, and a Boeing KC-46A midair refueling aircraft.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: In September 2015 Abe was re-elected as president of the LDP in an uncontested election after LDP Diet member Seiko Noda failed to garner enough support to stand as a candidate. Following this Abe carried out a cabinet reshuffle, once again keeping the key ministers of Finance, Economy, Foreign Affairs, and the Chief Cabinet Secretary in post. He also created a new ministerial position for the coordination of policies related to the economy, population decline, and social security reform, which was filled by Katsunobu Katō.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: At a press conference after his official re-election as LDP president, Abe announced that the next stage of his administration would focus on what he called "Abenomics 2.0", the aim of which was to tackle issues of low fertility and an aging population and create a society "in which each and every one of Japan's 100 million citizens can take on active roles". This new policy consisted of targets which Abe referred to as "three new arrows"; to boost Japan's GDP to 600 trillion yen by 2021, to raise the national fertility rate from an average of 1.4 to 1.8 children per woman and stabilize the population at 100 million, and to create a situation where people would not have to leave employment to care for elderly relatives by the mid-2020s. Abe explained that the government would take measures to increase wages, boost consumption, and expand childcare, social security and care services for the elderly to meet these goals.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: This new iteration of Abenomics was met with some criticism by commentators, who argued that it was not yet clear if the first three arrows had succeeded in lifting Japan out of deflation (inflation was some way below the 2 percent target), that the new arrows were merely presented as targets without the necessary policies to meet them, and that the targets themselves were unrealistic. However, opinion polls during the final months of 2015 showed the Abe cabinet's approval ratings once again climbing into positive figures after the change in emphasis back to economic issues.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: At the conclusion of the Trans-Pacific Partnership talks in early October 2015, Abe hailed the agreement for creating an "unprecedented economic zone" and opening up possibilities for an even wider Asia-Pacific free trade deal and Japanese trade with Europe. He also promised to mitigate any negative effects on the Japanese agricultural sector. GDP figures released in November 2015 initially appeared to show that Japan had entered a second recession since the implementation of Abenomics. However, these figures were subsequently revised to show that the economy had grown by 1 percent in the third quarter, thus avoiding recession.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: In December 2015, the two parties making up Abe's governing coalition agreed to introduce a reduced rate of consumption tax for food when the anticipated tax increase from 8 to 10 percent takes place in April 2017. This deal was reached after Abe was seen to come down strongly in favor of the position held by his junior coalition partner, the Komeito, that the tax rate should be reduced, which prompted some disagreement from members of his party who favored a policy of greater fiscal consolidation through taxes. Abe dismissed the chairman of the LDP's tax panel Takeshi Noda (who opposed the reduction), and appointed Yoichi Miyazawa, who was more favorable to the policy, as his replacement. Abe declared the tax deal to be "the best possible result" of the negotiations.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: At the 2016 election to the House of Councillors, the first that allowed Japanese citizens 18 and over to vote, Abe led the LDP–Komeito pact to victory, with the coalition being the largest in the House of Councillors since it was set at 242 seats. The election's results opened the debate on constitutional reform, particularly in amending Article 9 of Japan's pacifist constitution, with pro-revisionist parties gaining the two-thirds majority being necessary for reform, alongside a two-thirds majority in the House of Representatives, which would ultimately lead to a nationwide referendum.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: Abe remained relatively quiet on the issue for the remainder of the year, but in May 2017, announced that the constitutional reform would be in effect by 2020.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: The 2017 general election was held on 22 October. Prime Minister Abe called the snap election on 25 September, while the North Korea crisis was prominent in the news media. Political opponents of Abe say the snap election was designed to evade questioning in parliament over alleged scandals. Abe was expected to retain a majority of seats in the Diet. Abe's ruling coalition took almost a majority of the vote and two-thirds of the seats. The last-minute campaigning and voting took place as Typhoon Lan, the biggest typhoon of 2017, was wreaking havoc on Japan.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: On 20 September 2018, Abe was re-elected as leader of the main ruling Liberal Democratic Party. On 19 November 2019, Abe became Japan's longest-serving prime minister, surpassing the 2,883-day record of Katsura Tarō. On 24 August 2020, Abe became the longest-serving prime minister in terms of consecutive days in office, surpassing Eisaku Satō's 2,798-day record.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: In March 2018, it was revealed that the finance ministry (with finance minister Tarō Asō at its head) had falsified documents presented to the parliament in relation to the Moritomo Gakuen scandal, in order to remove 14 passages implicating Abe. It was suggested that the scandal could cost Abe his seat as Liberal Democratic party's leader. Further accusations arose the same year that Abe had given preferential treatment to his friend Kotarō Kake to open a veterinary department at his school, Kake Gakuen. Abe denied the charges, but support for his administration fell below 30% in the polls, the lowest since his taking power in 2012. Those who called for him to step down included former prime minister Junichiro Koizumi. The scandal was referred to by some as "Abegate". Former prime minister Junichiro Koizumi speculated that Abe would likely resign due to the scandal.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: The scandals, while not damaging his political standing permanently, did little good for his image. In July 2018, Abe's public standing was further hit after he held a drinking party with LDP lawmakers during the peak of the floods in western Japan. In 2020, Abe came under further criticism for extending the term of top Tokyo prosecutor Hiromu Kurokawa, who later resigned amid a gambling scandal. Abe's approval rating fell from 40% to 27% during the month of May 2020, largely due to his handling of the Kurokawa situation.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: Abe supported the 2018 North Korea–United States summit. Shortly after the summit was announced, Abe told reporters he appreciated "North Korea's change" and attributed the diplomatic change in tone to the coordinated sanctions campaign by the United States, Japan, and South Korea. Abe, however, cautioned President Trump not to compromise on North Korea's missile program and leave Japan exposed to short-range missiles or relieve pressure on North Korea too soon before complete denuclearization. Abe also expressed a desire to hold a bilateral meeting with North Korea on the issue of abductions of Japanese citizens, pressing President Trump to raise the matter at the summit. Reports in 2019 revealed that Abe authorized covering up information about two missing people from Japan living in North Korea.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: In 2018, Abe paid a 2-day formal visit to the PRC, in the hopes of improving foreign relations, where he had several meetings with President Xi Jinping. At this time, Abe promised that in 2019 he would ease restrictions on the eligibility for PRC citizens to obtain Japanese visas, especially among teenagers. Abe also stated that he hoped Xi Jinping would visit Japan to cultivate better relations between the two countries. Abe cautioned Xi Jinping over protests in Hong Kong at the G20 Summit. Abe told Xi it is important for "a free and open Hong Kong to prosper under the 'one country, two systems' policy".


title: Shinzo Abe

text: Regarding the territorial dispute with Russia, Abe adopted the "two plus alpha" approach, altering the previous governments' position that Habomai, Shikotan, Etorofu and Kunashiri islands be returned to Japan's sovereign. In a 2021 interview, Abe spoke about his negotiation with the Russian president Vladimir Putin in 2018, also confirming he had requested Fumio Kishida to continue with this approach, to avoid worsening Japan's relations with Russia.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: Writing of what he characterizes as the most serious failure of the Abe administration, co-director of the Institute of Contemporary Japanese Studies of Temple University in Japan Robert Dujarric, wrote: "The election of Donald Trump raised existential questions about the reliability of Washington as a guarantor of Tokyo's security. The events of January 6… reflected the fact that a substantial number of Republican voters believe that Trump had won the election and appeared to endorse his supporters' use of lethal violence to keep him in the White House, which was indeed very worrisome for the Japanese. Yet neither Abe's Japan nor for that matter any country that relies on the US as the ultimate guarantor of its security—South Korea, Taiwan, or all of NATO—took any significant steps to buttress their military to prepare for the day when the Americans might not be able to come to their rescue. That is also true for their diplomacy, economic policies, and other components of national security. For this, however, it is hard to blame Abe alone. Japanese voters would have had no interest in such a course of action, which would have entailed major costs."


title: Shinzo Abe

text: In July 2018, Japan became the second country after Mexico to ratify the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). CPTPP evolved from the Trans-Pacific Partnership which never came into force after then US president Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the agreement in early 2017. Abe's administration was credited with overcoming protectionist pressures within Japan and rallying the 10 other TPP member countries to support CPTPP, which largely kept the previous agreement intact and left the door open to an eventual US return.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: In 2019, Japan resumed commercial whaling, for the first time in 31 years, a day after withdrawing from the International Whaling Commission (IWC). The district Abe hailed from and represented includes a major whaling center and he long pushed to resume commercial whaling.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: Abe's colitis relapsed in June 2020 and resulted in his health deteriorating through the summer. Following several hospital visits, Abe announced on 28 August 2020 that he intended to retire as prime minister, citing his inability to carry out the duties of the office while seeking treatment for his condition. During the press conference announcing his retirement, Abe indicated that he would remain in office until a successor was chosen by the LDP, but declined to endorse any specific successor. Abe expressed regret at being unable to fully accomplish his policy goals due to his early retirement. Yoshihide Suga was elected as his successor by the LDP on 14 September 2020 and took office as prime minister on 16 September.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: On 8 July 2022 around 11:30 JST, Abe was shot while delivering a campaign speech at Yamato-Saidaiji Station, Nara. He was supporting fellow LDP party member Kei Satō for the House of Councillors election.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: The assassin approached Abe from behind and fired two shots using a homemade firearm. The first shot missed and prompted Abe to turn around, at which point a second shot was fired, hitting Abe in the neck and chest area. He was fatally struck in the heart.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: Abe was rushed to the Nara Medical University Hospital in Kashihara by helicopter. Prior to his arrival at the hospital, Abe had already shown no vital signs. Despite a transfusion of 100 units of blood, the blood loss was too great and attempts to resuscitate Abe failed; he was pronounced dead at 17:03 JST. He was 67 years old.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: A 41-year-old man named Tetsuya Yamagami, a former JMSDF member who served for three years from 2002 to 2005, was arrested directly and later confessed to local police. Yamagami stated that he held a grudge against the Unification Church and shot Abe because "the religious group and Abe were connected". Yamagami said he resented the fact that his mother was brain-washed by the religious group and went bankrupt. Yamagami had been trying to kill Hak Ja Han of the Unification Church since around 2002 when his mother went bankrupt, but he gave up because he could not get close to her and changed his target to Abe. He also stated that he killed Abe because he believed the former prime minister had spread the religion to Japan. Abe and his family were known to have long-standing ties to the Unification Church, dating back to his grandfather Kishi Nobusuke; Abe himself had held speeches in support of the religious movement. According to research by "Nikkan Gendai", 10 out of 20 members in the Fourth Abe Cabinet had connections to the Unification Church. Yamagami said that he "didn't have a grudge against Abe's political beliefs".


title: Shinzo Abe

text: In response to the shooting and his subsequent death, numerous present and former world leaders expressed their sympathies and support for Abe. His body was returned to Tokyo the day after his assassination and his funeral took place on 27 September 2022.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: Throughout his political life, Abe often engaged in historical negationism, especially in regards to Japanese war crimes during World War II. According to some analysts, this caused Japan's relations with South Korea and China to deteriorate under his premiership. In the PRC, how Abe is thought of in retrospect is mixed, while he was often criticized as an extreme nationalist, others also recognized his efforts for reconciliation between their two countries.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: Since 1997, as the bureau chief of the "Institute of Junior Assembly Members Who Think About the Outlook of Japan and History Education", Abe led the Society for History Textbook Reform. Abe was affiliated with the ultra-conservative, revisionist organization Nippon Kaigi (Japan Conference).


title: Shinzo Abe

text: According to Alexis Dudden, a professor of history at the University of Connecticut who specializes in modern Japan and Korea, in the 1990s when Abe first became a parliamentarian he is believed to have co-authored a document denying the Nanjing Massacre; the article used to be available in Japan's Diet archives but has since disappeared. Abe also made comments that denied the occurrence of the massacre. Dudden has said Nanjing Massacre denial is akin to Holocaust denial.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: In 2007, Abe denied to reporters that Japan forced women into sexual slavery during World War II. On his official homepage, he questioned the extent to which coercion was applied toward the comfort women, dismissing South Korean positions on the issue as foreign interference in Japanese domestic affairs. In a Diet session on 6 October 2006, Abe revised his statement regarding comfort women and said that he accepted the report issued in 1993 by the sitting cabinet secretary, Yōhei Kōno, wherein the Japanese government officially acknowledged the issue. Later in the session, Abe stated his belief that Class-A war criminals are not criminals under Japan's domestic law.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: In a meeting of the Lower House Budget Committee in February 2006, Shinzo Abe said, "There is a problem as to how to define aggressive wars; we cannot say it is decided academically", and "It is not the business of the government to decide how to define the last world war. I think we have to wait for the estimation of historians".


title: Shinzo Abe

text: On a television program in July 2006, he denied that Manchukuo was a puppet state of Japan. Manchukuo was notorious for its exploitative rule and use of slave labor when it was under the economic management of Nobusuke Kishi, Abe's grandfather.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: Abe published a book called in July 2006, which became a bestseller in Japan. The South Korean and PRC governments, as well as noted academics and commentators, voiced concern about Abe's historical views.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: In March 2007, in response to a United States Congress resolution introduced by Mike Honda, Abe denied any government coercion in the recruitment of comfort women during World War II. This was in line with a statement made almost ten years earlier, in which Abe voiced his opposition to the inclusion of the subject of military prostitution in several school textbooks while denying any coercion in the "narrow" sense of the word, environmental factors notwithstanding. This statement provoked negative reactions in Asian and western countries; a "New York Times" editorial on 6 March 2007 commented for instance:


title: Shinzo Abe

text: A 2007 "Washington Post" editorial, "Shinzo Abe's Double Talk", also criticized him: "he's passionate about Japanese victims of North Korea—and blind to Japan's own war crimes". In "The New York Times" in 2014, an editorial called Abe a "nationalist" who was a profound threat to American–Japanese relations, and an opinion piece labeled Abe's position on the subject of comfort women a "war on truth". The same editorial presented him as a revisionist, a view largely accepted by the international and part of the Japanese press. Writing in the "London Review of Books", political scientist Edward Luttwak called Abe a "pragmatic Japanese Tory driving through reforms at home, while weaving an alliance aimed at containing China".


title: Shinzo Abe

text: In 2015, Abe publicly recognized that the Japanese government had trapped the "comfort women" in sexual slavery, apologized, and developed a reparations fund with South Korean president Park Geun-hye. In 2018, while negotiating a "comfort women" deal with then South Korean president Moon Jae-in, Abe demanded that South Korea remove statues of comfort women that had been installed in South Korea, the United States, Australia, and Germany. In late 2018, the Supreme Court of Korea and other high courts ordered several Japanese companies, including Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Nachi-Fujikoshi, and Nippon Steel, to make compensations to the families of Koreans who were unfairly treated and illegally forced to supply labor for World War II war efforts. The Japanese government protested these decisions, Abe argued that any issues concerning Japan's rule of Korea were previously resolved in the Treaty on Basic Relations Between Japan and the Republic of Korea which normalized relations between Japan and South Korea, adding that further requests of reparations meant that South Korea had violated the treaty. In August 2019, Abe's cabinet approved the removal of South Korea from Japan's trade "whitelist"; the subsequent trade dispute between South Korea and Japan is still ongoing and has caused a significant deterioration in Japan–South Korea relations.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: The "Asahi Shimbun" accused Abe and Shōichi Nakagawa of censoring a 2001 NHK program concerning "The Women's International War Crimes Tribunal". The "tribunal" was a private committee to adjudicate comfort women; about 5,000 people, including 64 victims from Japan and abroad, attended. The committee members, who claimed to be specialists in international law, claimed that Emperor Hirohito and the Japanese government were responsible for the use of comfort women. The TV program, however, did not mention the full name of the tribunal and keywords such as "Japanese troops" or "sexual slavery", and it also cut the sight of the tribunal, the host grouping, statements of the organizer, and the judgment itself. Instead, it presented criticism against the tribunal by a right-wing academic and his statement that "there was no abduction of sex slaves and they were prostitutes".


title: Shinzo Abe

text: On the day following the "Asahi Shimbun" report, Akira Nagai, the chief producer and primary person responsible for the program held a press conference and ensured the report of the "Asahi Shimbun". Abe stated that the content "had to be broadcast from a neutral point of view" and "what I did is not to give political pressure". Abe said, "It was political terrorism by "Asahi Shimbun" and it was tremendously clear that they had the intention to inhume me and Mr. Nakagawa politically, and it is also clear that it was a complete fabrication." He also characterized the tribunal as a "mock trial" and raised objection to the presence of North Korean prosecutors, singling them out as agents of the North Korean government. Abe's actions in the NHK incident were criticized by journalists as being both illegal for violating the Broadcasting Act and unconstitutional for violating the constitution.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: On 24 October 2006, a report emerged that Abe's new administration had called on the NHK to "pay attention" to the North Korean abductees issue. Critics, some even within Abe's own LDP party, charged that the government was violating freedom of expression by meddling in the affairs of the public broadcaster.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: In December 2006, it was revealed that former prime minister Junichiro Koizumi's government, in which Abe was Chief Cabinet Secretary, had influenced town hall-style meetings, during which paid performers would ask government officials favorable questions.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: On 22 November 2012, it was reported that TBS's early morning TV show "Asazuba" accidentally displayed Abe's photo alongside a news report about an NHK announcer's arrest for a sex offense. Abe's face filled viewers' screens along with the name of NHK announcer Takeshige Morimoto, who anchors NHK's "Ohayo Nippon" program on Saturday and Sunday. Morimoto was arrested for allegedly groping a woman on the train. Abe posted on his public Facebook page, "This morning on the TBS show "Asazuba", when a newscaster reported on a story regarding the apprehension of a molester, a photo of me was shown. Images of this blunder can now be seen clearly across the Internet, Have the slander campaigns already begun!? If this were merely an accident, it would be proper for the TV station to give me a personal apology, but as yet I haven't heard a single word." The newscaster acknowledged that the incorrect image had been displayed, but merely stated that the photo was "unrelated" and did not refer to the politician by name. Neither Abe nor his office received any form of apology.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: Abe's constant interference and intimidation of media outlets was cited as one of many reasons Japan fell to 72nd place on the Press Freedom Index in 2016, in contrast to its previous 11th place ranking from six years prior.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: Abe visited the Yasukuni Shrine on several occasions, which enshrines the spirits of Japan's war dead, including several Class-A war criminals convicted in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. While serving as Chief Cabinet Secretary in the government of Junichiro Koizumi, he visited in April 2006, prompting South Korea to describe the trip as "regrettable". He visited again on 15 August 2012, the anniversary of the end of World War II. After winning the presidency of the Liberal Democratic Party, he visited on 17 October 2012, in an official capacity as party president.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: He initially refrained from visiting the shrine as a sitting prime minister. He did not visit at all during his first term from September 2006 to September 2007, unlike his predecessor Koizumi, who had visited yearly while in office. Abe's not visiting the shrine prompted a Japanese nationalist named Yoshihiro Tanjo to cut off his little finger in protest and mail it to the LDP. While campaigning for the presidency of the LDP in 2012, Abe said that he regretted not visiting the shrine while prime minister. He again refrained from visiting the shrine during the first year of his second stint as prime minister in consideration of improving relations with the PRC and Korea, whose leaders refused to meet with Abe during this time. He said on 9 December 2013 that "it is natural that we should express our feelings of respect to the war dead who sacrificed their lives for the nation... but it is my thinking that we should avoid making [Yasukuni visits] political and diplomatic issues". In lieu of visiting, Abe sent ritual offerings to the shrine for festivals in April and October 2013, as well as the anniversary of the end of World War II in August 2013.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: His first visit to the shrine as prime minister took place on 26 December 2013, the first anniversary of his second term in office. It was the first visit to the shrine by a sitting prime minister since Junichiro Koizumi visited in August 2006. Abe said that he "prayed to pay respect for the war dead who sacrificed their precious lives and hoped that they rest in peace". The PRC government published a protest that day, calling government visits to the shrine "an effort to glorify the Japanese militaristic history of external invasion and colonial rule and to challenge the outcome of World War II". Qin Gang of the PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Abe is "unwelcome by Chinese people... Chinese leaders won't meet him any more". The "Mainichi Shimbun" argued in an editorial that the visit could also "cast a dark shadow" on relations with the United States. The US embassy in Tokyo released a statement saying that "the United States is disappointed that Japan's leadership has taken an action that will exacerbate tensions with Japan's neighbors". "The Wall Street Journal" reported that US officials urged Abe not to visit the shrine and pay homage to war criminals anymore. On 15 August 2014, the 69th anniversary of the surrender of Japan in World War II, Abe chose to not visit the shrine, in what was perceived as a diplomatic gesture to the PRC, South Korea, and Taiwan. Despite Abe's absence, the PRC and South Korea both voiced their disapproval at Japan's leadership as a large number of politicians, including three cabinet members, did attend the shrine to mark the anniversary.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: In May 2013, Abe posed for photographs giving thumbs up gestures while sitting in the cockpit of a Kawasaki T-4 military training aircraft of the Japan Air Self-Defense Force's Blue Impulse aerobatics team. The aircraft was numbered "731", which was the number of the infamous Imperial Japanese Army Unit 731 that conducted lethal chemical and biological experiments on live prisoners of war during World War II. South Korean politician Chung Mong-joon described Abe's actions as "an act of direct provocation to Korea, China and other victim nations". In response, a Japanese Defense Ministry official said that the numbering on the jet was coincidental and that the numbers were the pilot's individual ID number.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: On 28 April 2013, a new public event, the Restoration of Sovereignty Day, was held in Tokyo to mark the 61st anniversary of the end of the US occupation of Japan. It had been proposed by Abe in 2012. Since the US occupation of Okinawa ended in 1972 and nearly three-quarters of US troops in Japan continue to be stationed in Okinawa, the event, which was attended by Emperor Akihito, was denounced by many Okinawans, who saw it as celebrating a betrayal. There were demonstrations in both Okinawa and Tokyo.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: In 2015, the Abe government refused to admit refugees affected by conflicts in the Middle East and Africa. Abe said Japan must "solve its own problems before accepting immigrants." Abe backed a short-term work visa deal for migrant workers to "work for a limited period, earn more and return home."


title: Shinzo Abe

text: By the time Shinzo Abe was shot, many allegations about the Unification Association had already been made by Japanese journalists. Takashi Uesugi claims that "if you don't know about Abe's relationship with the Unification Church, you are disqualified as a journalist".


title: Shinzo Abe

text: Abe married Akie Matsuzaki, a socialite and former radio disc jockey, in 1987. She is the daughter of the president of Morinaga, a confectionery manufacturer. She is popularly known as the "domestic opposition party" due to her outspoken views, which often contradicted her husband's. Following her husband's first stint as prime minister, she opened an organic izakaya in the Kanda district of Tokyo, but remained inactive in management due to the urging of her mother-in-law. The couple were unable to have children, having undergone unsuccessful fertility treatments early in their marriage. Abe's elder brother, Hironobu Abe, became president and CEO of Mitsubishi Shōji Packaging Corporation, while his younger brother, Nobuo Kishi, became Senior Vice-Minister for Foreign Affairs.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: Abe was often referred to as the "shadow shogun" due to his profound influence on Japanese politics during his life. After his assassination, Japanologist Michael Green described Abe as "the most consequential modern Japanese leader" and argued that Japan's future appears to be that of Abe's "vision". Following Abe's assassination, the LDP–Komeito coalition won a majority of the available seats in the upper house in the 10 July election. This gave the government a majority in the upper house. Many, such as Sheila A. Smith of the Council on Foreign Relations and East Asia expert Jeff Kingston, speculated that a revised constitution, especially a revision of its article 9 clause which outlaws war and the maintenance of military forces, may become Abe's main legacy.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: A "Washington Post" analysis described Abe as the "preeminent statesman of the Indo-Pacific" whose realist approach helped build a cooperative security network in East Asia. Columnist Josh Rogin wrote that Abe's lasting legacy was a world better prepared to confront an increasingly assertive China. Similarly, US Admiral James Stavridis wrote that Abe's greatest contribution was a strengthened Japanese military. His death solicited tributes and condolences from many states and leaders, a testament to his commitment to international relations. Consultant Bill Emmott noted that thanks to Abe's diplomacy, he was more popular abroad than domestically, bearing similarities to Margaret Thatcher. Economist Matthew P. Goodman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) wrote that Abe's legacy was that of a "Champion of the Global Economic Order", whose administration launched the "Partnership for Quality Infrastructure" infrastructure project in Asia, proposed an internationally endorsed organizing principle for global data governance, kickstarted the TPP, and later salvaged it with the CPTPP. Indian commentator Harshil Mehta called Abe a "Unifier of Oceans" in his obituary due to formation of the Quad and wrote that he "stayed committed to the common cause" of Japan and India.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: Conversely, Abe's nationalism and historical denialism strained long-term relations with the neighboring PRC and South Korea. Abe's complex legacy was displayed in both nations following his assassination, where some praised Abe's efforts to improve relations and others denounced his views on Japanese history with its neighbors. In addition, journalist Jake Adelstein argued that Abe left a legacy vexed by authoritarianism, with his actions throughout his tenure such as the intimidation of media that were critical of him leading to Japan's fall on the Press Freedom Index to as low as 72nd, stoking anti-Korean sentiments, as well as the creation of a "Cabinet Personnel Bureau" to vet bureaucratic positions of anyone that may be openly critical of the government, among others.


title: Shinzo Abe

text: In Japan, Abe remains controversial and is described as the "most polarizing" figure in contemporary Japanese politics. Domestic divisiveness created by his historical negationist efforts is long-lasting. Abe also had a profound and lasting effect on the Japanese economy through Abenomics, leaving behind a mixed economic record.


title: Vivien Leigh

text: Vivien Leigh ( ; 5 November 1913 – 8 July 1967; born Vivian Mary Hartley), styled as Lady Olivier after 1947, was a British actress. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress twice, for her definitive performances as Scarlett O'Hara in "Gone with the Wind" (1939) and Blanche DuBois in the film version of "A Streetcar Named Desire" (1951), a role she had also played on stage in London's West End in 1949. She also won a Tony Award for her work in the Broadway musical version of "Tovarich" (1963). Although her career had periods of inactivity, in 1999 the American Film Institute ranked Leigh as the 16th greatest female movie star of classic Hollywood cinema.


title: Vivien Leigh

text: After completing her drama school education, Leigh appeared in small roles in four films in 1935 and progressed to the role of heroine in "Fire Over England" (1937). Lauded for her beauty, Leigh felt that her physical attributes sometimes prevented her from being taken seriously as an actress. Despite her fame as a screen actress, Leigh was primarily a stage performer. During her 30-year career, she played roles ranging from the heroines of Noël Coward and George Bernard Shaw comedies to classic Shakespearean characters such as Ophelia, Cleopatra, Juliet and Lady Macbeth. Later in life, she performed as a character actress in a few films.


title: Vivien Leigh

text: At the time, the public strongly identified Leigh with her second husband, Laurence Olivier, who was her spouse from 1940 to 1960. Leigh and Olivier starred together in many stage productions, with Olivier often directing, and in three films. She earned a reputation for being difficult to work with and for much of her life, she had bipolar disorder, as well as recurrent bouts of chronic tuberculosis, which was first diagnosed in the mid-1940s and ultimately led to her death at age 53.


title: Vivien Leigh

text: Leigh was born Vivian Mary Hartley on 5 November 1913 in British India on the campus of St. Paul's School in Darjeeling, Bengal Presidency. She was the only child of Ernest Richard Hartley, a British broker, and his wife, Gertrude Mary Frances (née Yackjee; she also used her mother's maiden name of Robinson). Her father was born in Scotland in 1882, while her mother, a devout Roman Catholic, was born in Darjeeling in 1888 and might have been of Irish, Anglo-Indian and Armenian ancestry. Gertrude's parents, who lived in India, were Michael John Yackjee (born 1840), an Anglo-Indian man of independent means, and Mary Teresa Robinson (born 1856), who was born to an Irish family killed during the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and grew up in an orphanage, where she met Yackjee; they married in 1872 and had five children, of whom Gertrude was the youngest. Ernest and Gertrude Hartley were married in 1912 in Kensington, London.


title: Vivien Leigh

text: In 1917, Ernest Hartley was transferred to Bangalore as an officer in the Indian Cavalry, while Gertrude and Vivian stayed in Ootacamund. At the age of three, young Vivian made her first stage appearance for her mother's amateur theatre group, reciting "Little Bo Peep". Gertrude Hartley tried to instill an appreciation of literature in her daughter and introduced her to the works of Hans Christian Andersen, Lewis Carroll and Rudyard Kipling, as well as stories of Greek mythology and Indian folklore. At the age of six, Vivian was sent by her mother from Loreto Convent, Darjeeling, to the Convent of the Sacred Heart (now Woldingham School) then situated in Roehampton, southwest London. One of her friends there was future actress Maureen O'Sullivan, two years her senior, to whom Vivian expressed her desire to become "a great actress". She was removed from the school by her father, and travelling with her parents for four years, she attended schools in Europe, notably in Dinard (Brittany, France), Biarritz (France), the Sacred Heart in San Remo on the Italian Riviera, and in Paris, becoming fluent in both French and Italian. The family returned to Britain in 1931. She attended "A Connecticut Yankee", one of O'Sullivan's films playing in London's West End, and told her parents of her ambitions to become an actress. Shortly after, her father enrolled Vivian at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in London.


title: Vivien Leigh

text: Vivian met Herbert Leigh Holman, known as Leigh Holman, a barrister 13 years her senior, in 1931. Despite his disapproval of "theatrical people", they married on 20 December 1932 and she terminated her studies at RADA, her attendance and interest in acting having already waned after meeting Holman. On 12 October 1933 in London, she gave birth to a daughter, Suzanne, later Suzanne Farrington.


title: Vivien Leigh

text: Leigh's friends suggested she take a minor role as a schoolgirl in the film "Things Are Looking Up", which was her film debut, albeit uncredited as an extra. She engaged an agent, John Gliddon, who believed that "Vivian Holman" was not a suitable name for an actress. After rejecting his many suggestions, she took "Vivian Leigh" as her professional name. Gliddon recommended her to Alexander Korda as a possible film actress, but Korda rejected her as lacking potential. She was cast in the play "The Mask of Virtue", directed by Sidney Carroll in 1935, and received excellent reviews, followed by interviews and newspaper articles. One such article was from the "Daily Express", in which the interviewer noted "a lightning change came over her face", which was the first public mention of the rapid changes in mood which had become characteristic of her. John Betjeman, the future poet laureate, described her as "the essence of English girlhood". Korda attended her opening night performance, admitted his error, and signed her to a film contract. She continued with the play but, when Korda moved it to a larger theatre, Leigh was found to be unable to project her voice adequately or to hold the attention of so large an audience, and the play closed soon after. In the playbill, Carroll had revised the spelling of her first name to "Vivien".


title: Vivien Leigh

text: In 1960, Leigh recalled her ambivalence towards her first experience of critical acclaim and sudden fame, commenting, "that some critics saw fit to be as foolish as to say that I was a great actress. And I thought, that was a foolish, wicked thing to say, because it put such an onus and such a responsibility onto me, which I simply wasn't able to carry. And it took me years to learn enough to live up to what they said for those first notices. I find it so stupid. I remember the critic very well and have never forgiven him."


title: Vivien Leigh

text: In the autumn of 1935 and at Leigh's insistence, John Buckmaster introduced her to Laurence Olivier at the Savoy Grill, where he and his first wife Jill Esmond dined regularly after his performance in "Romeo and Juliet". Olivier had seen Leigh in "The Mask of Virtue" earlier in May and congratulated her on her performance.


title: Vivien Leigh

text: Olivier and Leigh began an affair while acting as lovers in "Fire Over England" (1937), while Olivier was still married to Esmond and Leigh to Holman. During this period, Leigh read the Margaret Mitchell novel "Gone with the Wind" and instructed her American agent to recommend her to David O. Selznick, who was planning a film version. She remarked to a journalist, "I've cast myself as Scarlett O'Hara", and "The Observer" film critic C. A. Lejeune recalled a conversation of the same period in which Leigh "stunned us all" with the assertion that Olivier "won't play Rhett Butler, but I shall play Scarlett O'Hara. Wait and see."


title: Vivien Leigh

text: Despite her relative inexperience, Leigh was chosen to play Ophelia to Olivier's Hamlet in an Old Vic Theatre production staged at Elsinore, Denmark. Olivier later recalled an incident when her mood rapidly changed as she was preparing to go onstage. Without apparent provocation, she began screaming at him before suddenly becoming silent and staring into space. She was able to perform without mishap, and by the following day she had returned to normal with no recollection of the event. It was the first time Olivier witnessed such behaviour from her. They began living together, as their respective spouses had each refused to grant either of them a divorce. Under the moral standards then enforced by the film industry, their relationship had to be kept from public view.


title: Vivien Leigh

text: Leigh appeared with Robert Taylor, Lionel Barrymore and Maureen O'Sullivan in "A Yank at Oxford" (1938), which was the first of her films to receive attention in the United States. During production, she developed a reputation for being difficult and unreasonable, partly because she disliked her secondary role but mainly because her petulant antics seemed to be paying dividends. After dealing with the threat of a lawsuit brought over a frivolous incident, Korda, however, instructed her agent to warn her that her option would not be renewed if her behaviour did not improve. Her next role was in "Sidewalks of London", also known as "St. Martin's Lane" (1938), with Charles Laughton.


title: Vivien Leigh

text: Olivier had been attempting to broaden his film career. He was not well known in the United States despite his success in Britain, and earlier attempts to introduce him to American audiences had failed. Offered the role of Heathcliff in Samuel Goldwyn's production of "Wuthering Heights" (1939), he travelled to Hollywood, leaving Leigh in London. Goldwyn and the film's director, William Wyler, offered Leigh the secondary role of Isabella, but she refused, preferring the role of Cathy, which went to Merle Oberon.


title: Vivien Leigh

text: Hollywood was in the midst of a widely publicised search to find an actress to portray Scarlett O'Hara in David O. Selznick's production of "Gone with the Wind" (1939). At the time, Myron Selznick—David's brother and Leigh's American theatrical agent—was the London representative of the Myron Selznick Agency. In February 1938, Leigh made a request to Myron Selznick that she be considered to play the part of Scarlett O'Hara.


title: Vivien Leigh

text: David O. Selznick watched her performances that month in "Fire Over England" and "A Yank at Oxford" and thought that she was excellent but in no way a possible Scarlett because she was "too British". Leigh travelled to Los Angeles, however, to be with Olivier and to try to convince David Selznick that she was the right person for the part. Myron Selznick also represented Olivier and when he met Leigh, he felt that she possessed the qualities that his brother was searching for. According to legend, Myron Selznick took Leigh and Olivier to the set where the burning of the Atlanta Depot scene was being filmed and stage-managed an encounter, where he introduced Leigh, derisively addressing his younger brother, "Hey, genius, meet your Scarlett O'Hara." The following day, Leigh read a scene for Selznick, who organized a screen test with director George Cukor and wrote to his wife, "She's the Scarlett dark horse and looks damn good. Not for anyone's ear but your own: it's narrowed down to Paulette Goddard, Jean Arthur, Joan Bennett and Vivien Leigh". The director, George Cukor, concurred and praised Leigh's "incredible wildness". She secured the role of Scarlett soon after.


title: Vivien Leigh

text: Filming proved difficult for Leigh. Cukor was dismissed and replaced by Victor Fleming, with whom Leigh frequently quarrelled. She and Olivia de Havilland secretly met with Cukor at night and on weekends for his advice about how they should play their parts. Leigh befriended Clark Gable, his wife Carole Lombard and Olivia de Havilland, but she clashed with Leslie Howard, with whom she was required to play several emotional scenes. Leigh was sometimes required to work seven days a week, often late into the night, which added to her distress, and she missed Olivier, who was working in New York City. On a long-distance telephone call to Olivier, she declared: "Puss, my puss, how I hate film acting! Hate, hate, and never want to do another film again!"


title: Vivien Leigh

text: Quoted in a 2006 biography of Olivier, Olivia de Havilland defended Leigh against claims of her manic behaviour during the filming of "Gone with the Wind": "Vivien was impeccably professional, impeccably disciplined on "Gone with the Wind". She had two great concerns: doing her best work in an extremely difficult role and being separated from Larry [Olivier], who was in New York."


title: Vivien Leigh

text: "Gone with the Wind" brought Leigh immediate attention and fame, but she was quoted as saying, "I'm not a film star—I'm an actress. Being a film star—just a film star—is such a false life, lived for fake values and for publicity. Actresses go on for a long time and there are always marvellous parts to play." The film won 10 Academy Awards including a Best Actress award for Leigh, who also won a New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress.


title: Vivien Leigh

text: In February 1940, Jill Esmond agreed to divorce Laurence Olivier, and Leigh Holman agreed to divorce Vivien, although they maintained a strong friendship for the rest of Leigh's life. Esmond was granted custody of Tarquin, her son with Olivier. Holman was granted custody of Suzanne, his daughter with Leigh. On 31 August 1940, Olivier and Leigh were married at the San Ysidro Ranch in Santa Barbara, California, in a ceremony attended only by their hosts, Ronald and Benita Colman and witnesses, Katharine Hepburn and Garson Kanin. Leigh had made a screen test and hoped to co-star with Olivier in "Rebecca", which was to be directed by Alfred Hitchcock with Olivier in the leading role. After viewing Leigh's screen test, David Selznick noted that "she doesn't seem right as to sincerity or age or innocence", a view shared by Hitchcock and Leigh's mentor, George Cukor.


title: Vivien Leigh

text: Selznick observed that she had shown no enthusiasm for the part until Olivier had been confirmed as the lead actor, so he cast Joan Fontaine. He refused to allow her to join Olivier in "Pride and Prejudice" (1940), and Greer Garson played the role Leigh had wanted for herself. "Waterloo Bridge" (1940) was to have starred Olivier and Leigh; however, Selznick replaced Olivier with Robert Taylor, then at the peak of his success as one of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's most popular male stars. Her top billing reflected her status in Hollywood, and the film was popular with audiences and critics.


title: Vivien Leigh

text: The Oliviers mounted a stage production of "Romeo and Juliet" for Broadway. The New York press publicised the adulterous nature of the beginning of Olivier and Leigh's relationship and questioned their ethics in not returning to the UK to help with the war effort. Critics were hostile in their assessment of "Romeo and Juliet". Brooks Atkinson for "The New York Times" wrote: "Although Miss Leigh and Mr. Olivier are handsome young people, they hardly act their parts at all." While most of the blame was attributed to Olivier's acting and direction, Leigh was also criticised, with Bernard Grebanier commenting on the "thin, shopgirl quality of Miss Leigh's voice". The couple had invested almost all of their combined savings of $40,000 in the project, and the failure was a financial disaster for them.


title: Vivien Leigh

text: The Oliviers filmed "That Hamilton Woman" (1941) with Olivier as Horatio Nelson and Leigh as Emma Hamilton. With the United States not yet having entered the war, it was one of several Hollywood films made with the aim of arousing a pro-British sentiment among American audiences. The film was popular in the United States and an outstanding success in the Soviet Union. Winston Churchill arranged a screening for a party that included Franklin D. Roosevelt and, on its conclusion, addressed the group, saying, "Gentlemen, I thought this film would interest you, showing great events similar to those in which you have just been taking part." The Oliviers remained favourites of Churchill, attending dinners and occasions at his request for the rest of his life; and, of Leigh, he was quoted as saying, "By Jove, she's a clinker."


title: Vivien Leigh

text: The Oliviers returned to Britain in March 1943, and Leigh toured through North Africa that same year as part of a revue for the armed forces stationed in the region. She reportedly turned down a studio contract worth $5,000 a week in order to volunteer as part of the war effort. Leigh performed for troops before falling ill with a persistent cough and fevers. In 1944, she was diagnosed as having tuberculosis in her left lung and spent several weeks in hospital before appearing to have recovered. Leigh was filming "Caesar and Cleopatra" (1945) when she discovered she was pregnant, then had a miscarriage. Leigh temporarily fell into a deep depression that hit its low point, with her falling to the floor, sobbing in an hysterical fit. This was the first of many major bipolar disorder breakdowns. Olivier later came to recognise the symptoms of an impending episode—several days of hyperactivity followed by a period of depression and an explosive breakdown, after which Leigh would have no memory of the event, but would be acutely embarrassed and remorseful.


title: Vivien Leigh

text: With her doctor's approval, Leigh was well enough to resume acting in 1946, starring in a successful London production of Thornton Wilder's "The Skin of Our Teeth"; but her films of this period, "Caesar and Cleopatra" (1945) and "Anna Karenina" (1948), were not great commercial successes. All British films in this period were adversely affected by a Hollywood boycott of British films. In 1947, Olivier was knighted and Leigh accompanied him to Buckingham Palace for the investiture. She became Lady Olivier. After their divorce, according to the style granted to the divorced wife of a knight, she became known socially as Vivien, Lady Olivier.


title: Vivien Leigh

text: By 1948, Olivier was on the board of directors for the Old Vic Theatre, and he and Leigh embarked on a six-month tour of Australia and New Zealand to raise funds for the theatre. Olivier played the lead in "Richard III" and also performed with Leigh in "The School for Scandal" and "The Skin of Our Teeth". The tour was an outstanding success and, although Leigh was plagued with insomnia and allowed her understudy to replace her for a week while she was ill, she generally withstood the demands placed upon her, with Olivier noting her ability to "charm the press". Members of the company later recalled several quarrels between the couple as Olivier was increasingly resentful of the demands placed on him during the tour. The most dramatic altercation occurred in Christchurch, New Zealand, when her shoes were not found and Leigh refused to go onstage without them. Olivier screamed an obscenity at her and slapped her face, and a devastated Leigh slapped him in return, dismayed that he would hit her publicly. Subsequently, she made her way to the stage in borrowed pumps, and in seconds, had "dried her tears and smiled brightly onstage". By the end of the tour, both were exhausted and ill. Olivier told a journalist, "You may not know it, but you are talking to a couple of walking corpses." Later, he would observe that he "lost Vivien" in Australia.


title: Vivien Leigh

text: The success of the tour encouraged the Oliviers to make their first West End appearance together, performing the same works with one addition, "Antigone," included at Leigh's insistence because she wished to play a role in a tragedy.


title: Vivien Leigh

text: Leigh next sought the role of Blanche DuBois in the West End stage production of Tennessee Williams's "A Streetcar Named Desire" and was cast after Williams and the play's producer Irene Mayer Selznick saw her in "The School for Scandal" and "Antigone"; Olivier was contracted to direct. The play contained a rape scene and references to promiscuity and homosexuality, and was destined to be controversial; the media discussion about its suitability added to Leigh's anxiety. Nevertheless, she believed strongly in the importance of the work.


title: Vivien Leigh

text: When the West End production of "Streetcar" opened in October 1949, J. B. Priestley denounced the play and Leigh's performance; and the critic Kenneth Tynan, who was to make a habit of dismissing her stage performances, commented that Leigh was badly miscast because British actors were "too well-bred to emote effectively on stage". Olivier and Leigh were chagrined that part of the commercial success of the play lay in audience members attending to see what they believed would be a salacious story, rather than the Greek tragedy that they envisioned. The play also had strong supporters, among them Noël Coward, who described Leigh as "magnificent".


title: Vivien Leigh

text: After 326 performances, Leigh finished her run, and she was soon assigned to reprise her role as Blanche DuBois in the film version of the play. Her irreverent and often bawdy sense of humour allowed her to establish a rapport with Marlon Brando, but she had an initial difficulty in working with director Elia Kazan, who was displeased with the direction that Olivier had taken in shaping the character of Blanche. Kazan had favoured Jessica Tandy and later, Olivia de Havilland over Leigh, but knew she had been a success on the London stage as Blanche. He later commented that he did not hold her in high regard as an actress, believing that "she had a small talent." As work progressed, however, he became "full of admiration" for "the greatest determination to excel of any actress I've known. She'd have crawled over broken glass if she thought it would help her performance." Leigh found the role gruelling and commented to the "Los Angeles Times", "I had nine months in the theatre of Blanche DuBois. Now she's in command of me." Olivier accompanied her to Hollywood where he was to co-star with Jennifer Jones in William Wyler's "Carrie" (1952).


title: Vivien Leigh

text: Leigh's performance in "A Streetcar Named Desire" won glowing reviews, as well as a second Academy Award for Best Actress, a British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Award for Best British Actress, and a New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress. Tennessee Williams commented that Leigh brought to the role "everything that I intended, and much that I had never dreamed of". Leigh herself had mixed feelings about her association with the character; in later years, she said that playing Blanche DuBois "tipped me over into madness".


title: Vivien Leigh

text: In 1951, Leigh and Laurence Olivier performed two plays about Cleopatra, William Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra" and George Bernard Shaw's "Caesar and Cleopatra", alternating the play each night and winning good reviews. They took the productions to New York, where they performed a season at the Ziegfeld Theatre into 1952. The reviews there were also mostly positive, but film critic Kenneth Tynan angered them when he suggested that Leigh's was a mediocre talent that forced Olivier to compromise his own. Tynan's diatribe almost precipitated another collapse; Leigh, terrified of failure and intent on achieving greatness, dwelt on his comments and ignored the positive reviews of other critics.


title: Vivien Leigh

text: In January 1953, Leigh travelled to Ceylon to film "Elephant Walk" with Peter Finch. Shortly after filming commenced, she had a nervous breakdown and Paramount Pictures replaced her with Elizabeth Taylor. Olivier returned her to their home in Britain, where, between periods of incoherence, Leigh told him she was in love with Finch and had been having an affair with him. Over a period of several months, she gradually recovered. As a result of this episode, many of the Oliviers' friends learned of her problems. David Niven said she had been "quite, quite mad". Noël Coward expressed surprise in his diary that "things had been bad and getting worse since 1948 or thereabouts". Leigh's romantic relationship with Finch began in 1948, and waxed and waned for several years, ultimately flickering out as her mental condition deteriorated.


title: Vivien Leigh

text: Also in 1953, Leigh recovered sufficiently to play "The Sleeping Prince" with Olivier, and in 1955 they performed a season at Stratford-upon-Avon in Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night", "Macbeth", and "Titus Andronicus". They played to capacity houses and attracted generally good reviews, Leigh's health seemingly stable. John Gielgud directed "Twelfth Night" and wrote, "... perhaps I will still make a good thing of that divine play, especially if he will let me pull her little ladyship (who is brainier than he but "not" a born actress) out of her timidity and safeness. He dares too confidently ... but she hardly dares at all and is terrified of overreaching her technique and doing anything that she has not killed the spontaneity of by overpractice." In 1955, Leigh starred in Anatole Litvak's film "The Deep Blue Sea"; co-star Kenneth More felt he had poor chemistry with Leigh during the filming.


title: Vivien Leigh

text: In 1956, Leigh took the lead role in the Noël Coward play "South Sea Bubble", but withdrew from the production when she became pregnant. Several weeks later, she miscarried and entered a period of depression that lasted for months. She joined Olivier for a European tour of "Titus Andronicus", but the tour was marred by Leigh's frequent outbursts against Olivier and other members of the company. After their return to London, her former husband, Leigh Holman, who could still exert a strong influence on her, stayed with the Oliviers and helped calm her.


title: Vivien Leigh

text: In 1958, considering her marriage to be over, Leigh began a relationship with actor Jack Merivale, who knew of Leigh's medical condition and assured Olivier that he would care for her. In 1959, when she achieved a success with the Noël Coward comedy "Look After Lulu!", a critic working for "The Times" described her as "beautiful, delectably cool and matter of fact, she is mistress of every situation".


title: Vivien Leigh

text: In 1960, she and Olivier divorced and Olivier soon married actress Joan Plowright. In his autobiography, Olivier discussed the years of strain they had experienced because of Leigh's illness: "Throughout her possession by that uncannily evil monster, manic depression, with its deadly ever-tightening spirals, she retained her own individual canniness—an ability to disguise her true mental condition from almost all except me, for whom she could hardly be expected to take the trouble."


title: Vivien Leigh

text: Merivale proved to be a stabilising influence for Leigh, but despite her apparent contentment, she was quoted by Radie Harris as confiding that she "would rather have lived a short life with Larry [Olivier] than face a long one without him". Her first husband Leigh Holman also spent considerable time with her. Merivale joined her for a tour of Australia, New Zealand and Latin America that lasted from July 1961 until May 1962, and Leigh enjoyed positive reviews without sharing the spotlight with Olivier. Though she was still beset by bouts of depression, she continued to work in the theatre and, in 1963, won a Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical for her role in "Tovarich". She also appeared in the films "The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone" (1961) and "Ship of Fools" (1965).


title: Vivien Leigh

text: Leigh's last screen appearance in "Ship of Fools" was both a triumph and emblematic of her illnesses that were taking root. Producer and director Stanley Kramer, who ended up with the film, planned to star Leigh but was initially unaware of her fragile mental and physical state. Later recounting her work, Kramer remembered her courage in taking on the difficult role, "She was ill, and the courage to go ahead, the courage to make the film—was almost unbelievable." Leigh's performance was tinged by paranoia and resulted in outbursts that marred her relationship with other actors, although both Simone Signoret and Lee Marvin were sympathetic and understanding. In one unusual instance during the attempted rape scene, Leigh became distraught and hit Marvin so hard with a spiked shoe that it marked his face. Leigh won the "L'Étoile de Cristal" for her performance in a leading role in "Ship of Fools".


title: Vivien Leigh

text: In May 1967, Leigh was rehearsing to appear with Michael Redgrave in Edward Albee's "A Delicate Balance" when her tuberculosis resurfaced. Following several weeks of rest, she seemed to recover. On the night of 7 July 1967, Merivale left her as usual at their Eaton Square flat to perform in a play, and he returned home just before midnight to find her asleep. About 30 minutes later (by now 8 July), he entered the bedroom and discovered her body on the floor. She had been attempting to walk to the bathroom and, as her lungs filled with liquid, she collapsed and suffocated. Merivale first contacted her family and later was able to reach Olivier, who was receiving treatment for prostate cancer in a nearby hospital. In his autobiography, Olivier described his "grievous anguish" as he immediately travelled to Leigh's residence, to find that Merivale had moved her body onto the bed. Olivier paid his respects, and "stood and prayed for forgiveness for all the evils that had sprung up between us", before helping Merivale make funeral arrangements; Olivier stayed until her body was removed from the flat.


title: Vivien Leigh

text: Her death was publicly announced on 8 July, and the lights of every theatre in central London were extinguished for an hour. A Catholic service for Leigh was held at St. Mary's Church, Cadogan Street, London. Her funeral was attended by the luminaries of British stage and screen. According to the provisions of her will, Leigh was cremated at the Golders Green Crematorium and her ashes were scattered on the lake at her summer home, Tickerage Mill, near Blackboys, East Sussex, England. A memorial service was held at St Martin-in-the-Fields, with a final tribute read by John Gielgud. In 1968, Leigh became the first actress honoured in the United States by "The Friends of the Libraries at the University of Southern California". The ceremony was conducted as a memorial service, with selections from her films shown and tributes provided by such associates as George Cukor, who screened the tests that Leigh had made for "Gone with the Wind", the first time the screen tests had been seen in 30 years.


title: Vivien Leigh

text: Leigh was considered to be one of the most beautiful actresses of her day, and her directors emphasised this in most of her films. When asked if she believed her beauty had been an impediment to being taken seriously as an actress, she said, "People think that if you look fairly reasonable, you can't possibly act, and as I only care about acting, I think beauty can be a great handicap, if you really want to look like the part you're playing, which isn't necessarily like you."