The stance of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe looks like that of Soviet Union Premier Georgy Malenkov after the death of Stalin in the 1950s or Chairman Hua Guofeng, who took over as premier in China after Mao Zedong in the second half of the 1970s. Koizumi's successor, the Abe Cabinet, is quite likely to share the fate of these other two administrations and end up being a weak, short-term power.
Prime Minister Abe has come to a fork in the road: He can continue on as Koizumi's successor or he can choose the path that extricates him from Koizumi's legacy. For Abe to set off on this path, he will have to achieve something akin to Khruschev's criticism of Stalin or Deng Xiaoping's rebirth of post-Mao China.
Koizumi politics were fixated on following American politics.
Because of this fixation, many good traditions of Japan were destroyed and the nation was transformed into a society characterized by an ugly wealth gap. The Abe Cabinet should work on correcting the pervasive and serious mistakes of the former Koizumi Cabinet.
Prime Minister Abe stands hesitantly at a crossroads. Will he end as a second Malenkov or Hua Guofeng? Or will he become like Khruschev, who led the anti-Stalinization and the subsequent reforms of the Soviet Union? Or perhaps he will choose the path followed by Deng Xiaoping, who spearheaded anti-Mao reforms and the opening of a wounded China in the wake of Mao's Cultural Revolution.
Prime Minister Abe's only legitimate option is to strive to become Japan's Deng Xiaoping. To do this, Abe should declare to the nation that the basis of Abe politics is the unwinding of the Koizumi legacy. If Abe develops a policy that corrects that legacy in detail and acknowledges the many ways that Koizumi politics destroyed the best of Japan's traditions, the prime minister will find public support. The steps Abe should take include, first, completely changing the foreign policies set in motion during Koizumi's premiership. He has already corrected Japan's policies toward Asia, but the central problem is fixing Japan's policy toward the US. He should correct the excessive "follow America" approach of the former prime minister and achieve more equal footing with the US.
The other step he should take concerns his party's dependence on the New Komeito Party and the Buddhist lay organization Soka Gakkai every time election day comes around. As long as the Liberal Democratic Party continues to lean on New Komeito and Soka Gakkai, the party will decline.
Prime Minister Abe must liberate himself from Koizumi politics, Bush politics, New Komeito and Soka Gakkai. The nation is waking up to the fact that the increase in the working poor, the worsening wealth gap and various other evils lay at the feet of Koizumi politics. For Prime Minister Abe, an anti-Koizumi approach is the path to political survival.

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