CHANGE IN JAPAN

by RAY FLEMING
THE world will be a slightly less colourful place with the retirement of Junichiro Koizumi as prime minister of Japan.
With his flowing long hair, informal style, innovative policies and liking for the music of Elvis Presley, Mr Koizumi was about as far removed from the standard image of a Japanese politician as it is possible to imagine. His successor, Shinzo Abe looks much more like the familiar party-machine politicians who succeeded each other as prime minister until Mr Koizumi broke the mould. But there are differences about Mr Abe also: at the age of 52 he is the country's youngest prime minister since the second world war and the first to have been born after it, and he has had relatively little ministerial experience. Mr Abe inherits an economy in reasonably good shape but the same cannot be said about Japan's relations with its Asian neighbours. Mr Koizumi's insistence on paying official visits to the Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo which honours Japan's war dead, including 14 Class A war criminals, has in particular offended China and South Korea, two countries where recollections of Japan's past militarism are still raw. Mr Abe has said that he wants Japan to play a more positive role internationally; Mr Koizumi began this trend, for instance by sending peacekeepers to Iraq, but Shinto Abe will have to move cautiously, both at home and abroad, if he wants Japan's Self-Defence forces to take less restrictive roles in the future.