Shinzo Abe, Japan's longest-serving prime minister, is resigning due to ulcerative colitis. He leaves behind a Japan that is economically stronger and more socially liberal than the one he inherited.
When Mr Abe took over in late 2012, I was extremely sceptical. After a short and unimpressive tenure in office in the mid-2000s, Mr Abe seemed unlikely to rise to the challenge of Japan's faltering economy and unequal society. And the fact he emerged from a right-wing political bloc seemed to portend a less liberal Japan.
But Mr Abe quickly defied the sceptics. He quickly gathered a group of capable advisers around him, including economics professor Koichi Hamada, Bank of Japan (BoJ) governor Haruhiko Kuroda, political ally Yoshihide Suga, and his wife, Akie Abe. As a result of their sage advice, Mr Abe's second term in office looked nothing like the cautious conservatism that characterises most administrations from Japan's long-dominant Liberal Democratic Party.
Mr Abe managed to revive Japan's economy. At the BoJ, Mr Kuroda embarked on the world's boldest programme of quantitative easing, even buying up a significant portion of the country's stock market. Although this didn't boost inflation to the targeted level of 2%, it did get Japan out of deflation, and appears to have stimulated both consumption and business investment. Despite a severely ageing society and the aftermath of a devastating tsunami and nuclear accident in 2011, Japan enjoyed the longest unbroken period of economic growth since the 1980s.
Monetary easing was only one arrow in the quiver of Abenomics, as Mr Abe's programme came to be called. Fiscal stimulus, proved harder to implement. Worries about the sustainability of the country's debt prompted Mr Abe to implement multiple consumption tax hikes, which probably slowed growth. Buffeted by conflicting economic and political pressures, the Abe administration was forced to chart a middle path on fiscal policy, which was ultimately not much of a factor in Japan's recovery.
Mr Abe also became a general champion of trade agreements and globalism, even as the US sank into sullen protectionism under Donald Trump. He concluded a major trade deal with the European Union and kept the Trans-Pacific Partnership alive.
At home, he tried to reform the hidebound and unproductive corporate culture. His administration created new corporate governance and investor stewardship codes, aimed at increasing shareholder control and profitability and decreasing the power of ageing, traditionalist managers. A 2018 revision tried to unravel corporate cross-shareholdings, a traditional practice that encourages productive companies to support unproductive ones.
Mr Abe also opened his homogeneous country up to immigration, creating a new guest-worker law that offered a path to permanent residency, as well as a new fast track for skilled immigrants.
Increased gender equality and immigration, though done for economic reasons, are transforming Japanese society. Now firmly ensconced in the working world, women are more vocal about challenging sexual harassment, demanding promotions and insisting men do more child care at home. Meanwhile, Japan is becoming a more diverse society, with one in eight young people in the capital city born in a foreign country. Many languages can be heard on the street and the nation is embracing more mixed-race celebrities.
Mr Abe didn't simply preside over this liberalisation and opening of Japanese society; he actively encouraged it, often in the face of fierce opposition from the right-wing forces many feared would be his support base. When a hate group emerged early in Mr Abe's tenure to threaten and harass the country's Korean ethnic minority, Mr Abe vocally criticised the racists and passed the nation's first law against hate speech, which was then used to prosecute members of the group.
So although Mr Abe resuscitated Japan's economy and laid the groundwork for future economic strength, his biggest accomplishment was to begin the transformation of a nation many observers had concluded would never allow itself to change. It's now possible to glimpse a future of a very different Japan.
At a time when many world leaders are retrenching into nationalism, protectionism, racism and authoritarianism, Mr Abe defied expectations and became a champion of the embattled notion of liberalism.
He leaves behind a legacy future Japanese leaders will struggle to match. But for the sake of their country's continued strength, dynamism, and prosperity, they must try. ©2020 Bloomberg Opinion
Noah Smith is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist.