WHEN Shinzo Abe becomes Prime Minister of Japan next month it will represent the succession to the throne of a political prince.

Five years ago he was hardly known outside the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. Yesterday, when he confirmed his candidacy for the party leadership, he became the leader-in-waiting of the second-richest country in the world.

At 51, he will be Japan’s youngest postwar Prime Minister. Uniquely for a leader of the LDP he has never held a ministerial post. He has been helped by luck and shrewd judgment, and by his descent from two generations of the topmost Japanese leaders. To his supporters, he is the herald of a new Japan, a proud country that is taking its rightful place in the world after 60 years of war guilt. For liberal Japanese, however, he is a dangerous rightwinger whose nationalistic views encourage xenophobia and isolate Japan from its Asian neighbours.

Mr Abe announced his candidacy in Hiroshima yesterday, in succession to Junichiro Koizumi, who steps down next month after serving the term limit as head of the party. With its safe parliamentary majority, the LDP leader automatically becomes Prime Minister — and with more than 70 per cent support among LDP MPs he has an unassailable lead over his rivals, Taro Aso, the Foreign Minister, and Sadakazu Tanigaki, the Finance Minister. The unanswered question is what kind of prime minister will this popular, but largely untested, character turn out to be.

Answers may well lie in Mr Abe’s upbringing, as the scion of one of the country’s most important political dynasties. His father was a foreign minister, his great-uncle Eisaku Sato was a prime minister, and so was his maternal grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, a minister throughout the Second World War. After Japan’s defeat, Mr Kishi was imprisoned for three years as a Class A war criminal, although he was eventually released without charge.

Mr Abe, as the grandson of a man who could easily have been hanged for war crimes, has an unusual perspective on the question of visits to Yasukuni Shrine, the monument to Japanese war dead where 14 Class A criminals are enshrined. The annual prayers made at the shrine by Mr Koizumi have infuriated Japan’s wartime colonies, China and Korea. Mr Abe has also been a regular visitor, but is under pressure to desist for the sake of restoring diplomatic relations.

But it is the memory of his grandfather’s opponents that seems to have shaped Mr Abe’s politics. “That left him with the feeling that leftwingers are against the national interest,” says Koichi Kato, an LDP MP and an opponent of Mr Abe. Mr Abe promises to scale down government spending to reduce debt. He wants education to promote a sense of Japanese national identity. He aims to revise the US-imposed postwar Constitution, which restricts the Armed Forces to a defensive role.

The crucial question is whether he will go to Yasukuni, and what his attitude to wartime history will be. Mr Koizumi visited Yasukuni to honour the war dead, but never challenged the notion that the war was a mistake. Mr Abe seems to think of it as a practical rather than a moral misjudgment. If he sticks to his principle, already bad relations with China will decline further, delighting conservatives, but alarming Japanese companies trying to do business there.

Mr Koizumi has been the boldest and most dynamic Japanese leader in 60 years, but Mr Abe is likely to be remembered as something of a revolutionary himself.

RIGHT TO RULE

His reformist privatisation agenda was defeated, but Mr Koizumi won a landslide re-election in 2005

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