The election of right-wing Shinzo Abe in Japan will bring an increase in tensions in East Asia but reform for an ailing economy.

08:38, UK, Monday 17 December 2012

Shinzo Abe.

Mark Stone

China Correspondent

Mark Stone

The weekend victory for Japan's Liberal Democratic Party represents a significant and perhaps unsettling lurch to the political right.

Expect two things: one, rising tensions right across East Asia and two, long overdue economic reform to tackle a broken economy.

The new prime minister is 58-year-old Shinzo Abe, the leader of Japan's right wing Liberal Democratic Party.

His election victory marks his return to Japan's highest office after he served as Japan's prime minister for exactly a year between September 2006 and September 2007.

Softly spoken but with nationalist views, Mr Abe will be Japan's seventh premier in six years.

He is from a conservative political family - his grandfather Nobusuke Kishi was prime minister twice in the late 1950s and his other grandfather and his father were both senior politicians.

Domestically, the economy will be Mr Abe's biggest challenge. He has called for "unlimited" monetary easing - essentially the continuous printing of money.

It is a controversial and high-risk strategy but analysts say it at least represents an effort to do something after years of indecision over the country's economy.

Mr Abe will find it easier than his predecessor did to push through his economic policies.

His LDP party combined with its junior coalition partner, the New Komeito Party, now has a two-thirds majority in the 480-seat lower house.

That is enough to override the upper house in which no party has overall control.

Internationally, there is significant anxiety over the direction in which Mr Abe will take Japan's relations with China and with South Korea.

Tokyo is locked in two separate maritime disputes, one with Seoul and the other with Beijing.

Map of contested Senkaku/Diaoyu islands

The dispute with China is particularly tense with the two countries both claiming sovereignty over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands in the East China Sea.

Mr Abe, a proud nationalist, has cast himself as the strong leader he says Japan needs to overcome its economic difficulties and to stand up to Chinese aggression.

He has called for a change to Japan's pacifist constitution to allow its military to adopt a more offensive stance.

His version of history will also cause some unease. He has openly said he doesn't believe that Japanese troops forced Chinese and Korean women into sexual slavery during World War Two despite evidence to the contrary.

He has called for schools to teach a more patriotic version of Japanese history and some say he shares the views of the far-right within Japan's political spectrum, the Japan Restoration Party (JRP).

The controversial mayor of Osaka, Toru Hashimoto, and the ex-governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, are both maverick nationalist leaders of the JRP which won 54 seats in the election, an increase of 11.

Mr Ishihara has a take on Japan's history which causes outrage in China. He openly asserts that the Nanjing Massacre during the Sino-Japanese war of 1937 in which an estimated 250,000 Chinese people were killed by Japanese soldiers never happened.

Mr Ishihara could be blamed for sparking the island dispute with China. His announcement in April that he would buy three of the islands from their private Japanese owners was seen as an overt attempt to irritate Beijing.

The Japanese government's move to block Ishihara's purchase by nationalising the islands was designed to diffuse the tension with China, but it had the opposite effect.

Mr Abe's views are not as extreme as those of the JRP.

But his overwhelming victory in the weekend election reflects a country that is more nationalist than it has been in decades.

Combine that with an identical increase in nationalism in China and the stage is set for an awkward year ahead.

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