Where will PM Abe take Japan now?

There will be little rejoicing over this weekend's Japanese election. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe remains the leader of his party and his country. But very few can imagine him winning a single popularity contest anywhere in the neighborhood of East Asia. No wonder, the Japanese people are not exactly reacting in wild kanpai-yelling celebrations.

This was an election without elation.

But where does Abe take Japan now?

Consider that his "blue-blood" genes are embedded in nationalistic DNA: His career-diplomat father was foreign minister (1982-1986) under the transformative prime ministership of Yasuhiro Nakasone and his mother's father was a deeply controversial prime minister who had served in Hideki Tojo's wartime cabinet. The worry is that Abe's roots offer dangerous strands of nationalism, fundamentalist values and militarism.

While clearly the man of the moment, Abe may also be understood as Japan's leader mainly by default. The opposition is in such a pathetic shambles that the polity has reverted back to little more than a one-party deal. Many Liberal Democratic Party voters took the resigned, pragmatic view that some kind of national leadership was preferable to none at all. Landslides are easier when the opposition is vacuous.

The domestic vacuum could make Abe more consequential abroad as well as at home. The world's stake in Japan's future is anything but peripheral. It remains the third-largest economy - ahead of Germany, France and the United Kingdom. If its political system now resembles what Americans, half-jokingly, would call an Edsel (the famous iconic auto failure in US corporate history), economically it can still shine like a Lexus. Everyone accepts that China's own economic rebirth would have been more difficult without productive and consuming neighbors like Japan, not to mention the Republic of Korea (and of course faraway United States).

For the foreseeable future, Japan remains the US' default Asian ally, its first go-to option. US opinion polls reaffirm support for that. In fact, the American public views this important society of talented people as the centerpiece of US-Asia security. But that sense of need could weaken if the Abe government becomes known for a policy of aggressive nationalism, which will trigger overwhelming regional pushback, as well as economic policies that backfire by shrinking Japan further.

The idea that the US could ever switch from a policy of containing China to one of seeking to align with China is far-fetched in the extreme. But Japanese re-armament and militarism could do the trick if it unites all of East Asia, with its haunting memories and unresolved wartime bitterness, against Tokyo. This is why Abe would be foolish to choose that route, and wise to dig deeper into his DNA and summon up his distant genetic linkage with another Japanese prime minister: Eisaku Sato (1964 to 1972). The first Asian to accept a Nobel Peace Prize, Sato was cited "for his renunciation of the nuclear option for Japan and his efforts to further regional reconciliation".

The Japanese people themselves, still largely pacifist, deserve better than Tojo II. They deserve a transformative leader who can refocus the economy and reorient foreign relations. They deserve another Sato, not another Tojo (referring to Hideki Tojo, the 40th prime minister of Japan during most of World War II, who was sentenced to death on November 12, 1948 for Japanese war crimes by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East).

Sometimes the US refers to Japan as its "Asian Great Britain" - a very rough analogy at best. But the comparison does remind one of a telling oracular observation by an iconic American secretary of state that offers perspective on Abe's current challenge. "Great Britain has lost an empire," the late Dean Acheson famously proffered in a 1962 speech at the US military academy at West Point, "but has not yet found a role." Not much that Abe has tried in his first three years as prime minister (including his 2006-7 term) has worked, except the deft engineering of his slam-dunk reelection.

Rooting for Abe to succeed might strike many in Easy Asia as emotionally problematic. But rooting for Japan to fail is a very risky business in all kinds of consequential ways. That's one reason why I always root for Japan.

The author is Loyola Marymount University's distinguished scholar of Asian and Pacific Studies, and has the Giants of Asia book series to his credit.