JAPAN is about to get its most nationalistic prime minister since the 1950s and ardent patriots are celebrating in advance, sensing that their sun is rising after decades of shame.

The resurgence of pride alarms Japan’s principal wartime victims, China and the two Koreas, but it is winning quiet applause from the United States, which foresees an enduring change in Japanese military policy.

The man in waiting is Shinzo Abe, 51, the chief cabinet secretary. He has struck a chord among voters by taking a hard line on North Korea, saying he would strike at missile sites before Kim Jong-il could fire off any weapons against Japan.

Abe has angered China, but pleased many Japanese, by defending his nation’s stance on its wartime record and the way it commemorates its war dead.

He has come forward as a new kind of Japanese leader as he prepares to claim victory in a leadership contest of the Liberal Democratic party (LDP), which controls the premier’s post, this Wednesday.

He will take over from Junichiro Koizumi, a charismatic maverick with a lion’s mane of grey hair, who broke with the LDP’s traditional factions, revived the world’s second biggest economy and sent Japanese forces to Iraq in support of the United States and Britain.

Abe wants to go further. His priority is to change Japan’s constitution, written by the Americans after 1945, to allow its armed forces to act in collective self-defence alongside the US.

The rise of China and the threat from North Korea, Abe believes, have changed Japanese psychology from its pacifism after the shattering defeat of the second world war. “He is the champion of the neoconservative cause,” said an Abe adviser over seafood in a French bistro in Tokyo full of creamy blossoms in delicate green porcelain.

The sophisticated Japanese right, which has long hungered to assert again the nation’s leading place in the world through its diplomacy and armed forces, senses that the hour and the man have come.

In a land where lineage counts for a lot — witness the patriotic joy at the birth of a male heir, Prince Hisahito, to the Chrysanthemum throne — Abe’s credentials are impeccable. In fact, they are distinctly old Japan.

Abe is descended from a powerful family on the southern island of Honshu, whose rival Choshu and Satsuma clans provided most of the military leaders to the Japanese empire.

His father Shintaro Abe served as foreign minister in the highly nationalist government of Yasuhiro Nakasone in the 1980s. His grandfather Nobusuke Kishi had a career that raises eyebrows in the West and still stirs passions in China.

Kishi ran the wartime economy in the cabinet of the military dictator Hideki Tojo, who was later hanged by the allies. Before that he helped the Japanese army to plunder Manchuria. But after the war Kishi reinvented himself as a founder of the LDP and became the prime minister who cemented Japan’s alliance with the United States.

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