On Sept. 20, Shinzo Abe won a third term in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party's presidential election and extended his tenure as prime minister beyond this fall. If he serves the full three years and leaves office in the fall of 2021, he will have become the nation's longest-service prime minister.
Already much has been discussed about what Abe wants to or should try to achieve in his final years as prime minister. So far the focus of this discussion seems to be mostly on how aggressively he might push for constitutional revision — a goal he has long desired to pursue.
However, what is more important for Japan is to begin the inevitable discussion that everyone has been carefully avoiding — what will the nation's political leadership look like in the post-Abe era?