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Japan denies claims that prime minister Shinzo Abe is seriously ill

Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe delivers a speech during a ceremony to mark the 75th anniversary of the bombing at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park on Thursday - AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko
Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe delivers a speech during a ceremony to mark the 75th anniversary of the bombing at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park on Thursday - AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko

Officials in Tokyo have played down suggestions that Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe is seriously ill after a news magazine reported that he vomited blood at his office on July 6 and cancelled his engagements for the rest of the day.

Mr Abe, 65, attended the memorial ceremony marking the 75th anniversary of the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima on Thursday and gave a brief address in which he called for the abolition of nuclear weapons, although it has been pointed out that he has not given any press conferences or attended parliamentary sessions for more than one month.

The latest edition of the weekly news magazine Flash reported on the concerns about Mr Abe’s health, with the Mainichi newspaper also quoting people who had met with the prime minister in recent weeks as saying that he appeared pale and tired.

Yoshihide Suga, the chief cabinet secretary, said the reports were inaccurate.

“I have been seeing him every day and he has been devoted to his duties in a calm manner,” Mr Suga said in a press conference. “I do not think there are any problems with him at all.”

There is, nevertheless, speculation in the halls of government that the prime minister is exhausted as he leads the campaign against coronavirus and, simultaneously, attempts to coordinate the response to severe flooding and landslides that affected much of the country in July.

It was announced last month that Mr Abe would take a few days off in late July, but that plan was cancelled when the scale of the flooding became apparent.

More recently, he has been overseeing the response to a second wave of the coronavirus pandemic. To date, there have been more than 41,000 cases of the virus in Japan, the majority clustered in the major cities of Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya, with 1,022 fatalities.

It has also been pointed out that Mr Abe has a history of medical concerns and that his first spell as prime minister ended after just 366 days in September 2007 in part because he was chronically ill with ulcerative colitis.

After three years on the back benches, Mr Abe was re-elected head of the Liberal Democratic Party and later led it to victory in the December 2012 general election. He has served as prime minister ever since, and on November 20 became Japan’s longest-serving elected leader.

He is expected to step down when his term as LDP president expires in September 2021.