Japanese PM Abe Resigns Over Worsening Health

In the second quarter, Japan was hit by its biggest economic slump on record as the pandemic emptied shopping malls and crushed demand for cars and other exports, bolstering the case for bolder policy action to avert a deeper recession.

Abe kept his promises to strengthen defences, boosting spending on the military after years of declines and expanding its capacity to project power abroad.

In a historic shift in 2014, his government re-interpreted the constitution to allow Japanese troops to fight abroad for the first time since World War Two.

A year later, Japan adopted laws scrapping a ban on exercising the right of collective self-defence or defending a friendly country under attack.

But Abe proved unable to revise the U.S.-drafted, post-war constitution’s pacifist Article 9, a personal mission that also eluded his grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, who quit as premier in 1960 because of uproar over a U.S-Japan security pact.

Abe resigned from his first stint as prime minister in 2007, citing ill-health after a year plagued by scandals in his cabinet and a huge election loss for his ruling party. He had since kept his illness in check with medicine that was not previously available.