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TOKYO - When he took office last year, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was the face of a new Japan -- young, assertive and on a mission to roll back the legacy of World War II defeat.
But for many of the voters who deserted his party, Abe's scandal-plagued government came to symbolise not change but the dirty, rough-and-tumble backroom politics of earlier generations.
The 52-year-old, who announced his resignation on Wednesday in the face of plunging approval ratings, was rocked by incessant scandals involving his cabinet, with several ministers quitting and another committing suicide.
It all was supposed to turn out quite differently.
A third-generation politician, the mild-mannered Abe was groomed from birth for the job by his elite, conservative family.
His grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, was a World War II cabinet member and was briefly jailed as a war criminal. Kishi later became a post-war prime minister and risked his career to build a new alliance with the United States.
In September, Abe became the nation's first premier born after the war and the youngest in post-war times. He vowed a new era was upon Japan.
Japanese media initially likened his style to that of a US president, with cameras zooming in on how he would walk hand-in-hand with his wife Akie -- unusual in a country where politicians' spouses rarely appear in public.
With a slogan of building a "beautiful country" proud of its past, Abe quickly got to work on conservative causes such as rewriting the pacifist constitution imposed by Washington after the war.
But polls showed that voters were more concerned about bread-and-butter issues such as pensions, and his party lost control of the upper house of parliament for the first time in its history in July.
Abe first came to public prominence through his tough talk on North Korea, which continued throughout his time in office.
He also reached out to China and South Korea, whose ties with Japan were tense under previous prime minister Junichiro Koizumi due to a dispute linked to war memories.
Even as China embraced Abe as a welcome change, however, he struggled at home to fills the shoes of the flamboyant and popular Koizumi.
Koizumi vowed to destroy the ruling Liberal Democratic Party in order to save it. He won a sweeping mandate in 2005 by casting opponents of free-market reforms within the party as the enemy.
In contrast to Koizumi, one of his mentors, Abe said he would rule by consensus.
He filled his cabinet with party stalwarts and readmitted lawmakers thrown out of the LDP by Koizumi for opposing his postal privatisation plan.
But a top aide earlier this year suggested that some cabinet members did not even bother to stop talking when the young premier entered the room.
"The problem is that Koizumi changed the expectations," said Jeffrey Kingston, a scholar at Temple University in Tokyo.
"Koizumi was always sending short messages ready to order for the evening news and repeating them. But Abe goes on and on," he said.
Abe's approval ratings went into freefall after the pensions agency admitted it bungled millions of payment records -- a sensitive issue in a rapidly ageing country. - AFP/ir
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