>>48210
>Was he still close to power?
Lol. He and his own have never been far from power. Since imperial times.
I believe he was a congresscritter, and in any case he remained the most prominent politician of the LDP, the main political entity in post-ww2 Japan (the other parties are secondary). People like Kishida and his predecessor (whatever was his name) are mostly figureheads that the LDP rotates whenever there's a crisis that affects approval ratings (in the case of Kishida's predecessor it was the handling of the pandemic post summer olympics). But through such surface-level reshuffles, Abe remained very influential in LDP, and therefore in jap govt.

Interestingly, Abe had recently made some counter-western-mainstream statements regarding the ukrainian conflict: He blamed the clown of kiev for not negotiating the autonomy of Donetsk and Lugansk, as stipulated in the Minsk accords, and for not stopping the Nato drive. He suggested that this should have been done through pressure by washington or other countries under USA's influence. Which is the exact thing Russia had been requesting of Germany and France, guarantors of Minsk 2: pressure Kiev into finally implementing the signed agreement. (And, though I can't remember exactly who, maybe it was Mearsheimer or Tooze, but probably others did too, people had suggested that some of the statements coming from the clown back in early and mid 2021 [remember, in washignton Biden was then coming on to office] seemed to be pleads for "someone" to remove from his shoulders the weight of making the decision to acquiesce to the russian demands regarding Nato/neutrality. He was basically saying then: "kiev had committed to nato membership in the past, but if nato doesn't want us, *wink wink nudge nudge*, then it's out of our hands", and specifically out of *his* hands, which is probably what really mattered to him, so that he could hope to not being lynched by the radicals)
Also, in opposition to the western propaganda which portrays Putin as madman, a second Stalin, literally Gitler, afflicted by a new terminal illness every month, Abe instead described him as "a realist"

Nonetheless, all jap politicians are ultimately just retinues for their Us masters. Despite those counter-msm statements he still expressed support for kiev and opposition to moscow in the practical matter of this war. That is: using the ukraine as proxy to inflict the greatest damage possible on the russia. He also supported economic warfare against russia. Wrt china he was among the most hawkish. He would pay lip service to every single bit of anti-china propaganda and destabilisation effort coming from imperial sources: tibet separatism, trump's tariffs on chinese imports, xinjiang separatism, muh yogurts, hong-kong separatism, taiwan separatism, south china sea, ban on xinjiang exports, semiconductors trade war, you name it. He supported changing the constitution away from its current "pacifist" format, so that it japan could focus on militarily confronting china. He also had rubbished the many accusations of war crimes committed by japan during the invasion of china in ww2 and had repeatedly visited the Yasukuni shrine where some ww2 war criminals are honoured (something which always pisses off beijing). Not surprising, though, when he's a descendent of one.

Oh, he also wanted Assad gone. His fate was thus sealed.

I agree that this a weird event. But japan is weird. This also reminds me of the assassination of Asanuma Inejiro. The photo of that event is famous in the political chans. Edgy "right-wing" morons will jerk off about 17-years-old Yamaguchi stabbing that darned gommie without understanding that Asanuma was in fact a nationalist of a sort. Abe would be classed as a "nationalist" too, but he was in fact happy to be just a neoliberal viceroy under the thumb of usa. Asanuma wanted the yank out.