Tobias Harris

“After his protracted hospitalization in 1998, Abe had controlled his ulcerative colitis. However, he now faced stress at a level unlike anything he had encountered before, with few opportunities to escape from the duties of office. The strains of office grew as he battled members of his own party to keep his job, and then embarked on his swing through three tropical countries at the height of summer.

Within a week of the elections, he experienced cramps and loss of appetite that worsened during his travels. In a confessional essay published in 2008, Abe described forcing down "ethnic cuisine" during his trip despite diarrhea and gastrointestinal pain. His condition worsened to the point that he lost nearly fifteen pounds over the course of a month and visited the bathroom upwards of thirty times a day. By the first week of September, he began to think about resigning.

His closest aides noticed that something was wrong. Yosano, for example, noticed that Abe was unusually subdued in a 6 September roundtable discussion with editorial writers. His determination to resign was stiffened on 10 September when, while speaking before the upper house, his pain made it difficult to concentrate and he omitted three lines from his prepared text. As he later wrote, "Whether it is possible to fulfill the duties of the prime minister or whether it is possible to respond adequately to the Diet in this condition-considering myself , I am truly sorry to say but I had no choice but to recognize this as impossible.”
― Tobias Harris, The Iconoclast: Shinzo Abe and the New Japan

“He could wield power by grinding away at problems, patiently deploying his assets, strategically distributing posts and co-opting rivals, knowing when to forge ahead despite opposition and when to back down, and always being willing to compromise. He would win by being inexorable.”
― Tobias Harris, The Iconoclast: Shinzo Abe and the New Japan