“He’s the most towering political figure in Japan over the past couple of decades,” said Dave Leheny, a political scientist at Waseda University. “He wanted Japan to be respected on the global stage in the way that he felt was deserved. ... He also wanted Japan to not have to keep apologizing for World War II.”

Abe, who died after being shot during a campaign speech, was 67.

Police arrested the suspected gunman at the scene of the attack, which shocked many in Japan, one of the world’s safest nations with some of the strictest gun control laws. Near the suspect was a double-barreled device that appeared to be a handmade gun.

Abe believed that Japan's postwar track record of economic success, peace and global cooperation was something "other countries should pay more attention to, and that Japanese should be proud of,” Leheny said.

Abe was a darling of conservatives but reviled by many liberals in Japan. And no policy was more divisive than his cherished, ultimately unsuccessful dream to revise Japan’s war-renouncing constitution. His ultra-nationalism also angered the Koreas and China, both wartime victims of Japan.

That push for constitutional revision stemmed from his personal history. Abe's grandfather, former Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi, despised the U.S.-drafted constitution, adopted during the American postwar occupation. For Abe, too, the 1947 charter was symbolic of what he saw as the unfair legacy of Japan’s war defeat and an imposition of the victors’ world order and Western values.