A new film from the Shinzo Abe Initiative for Peace and Security is introduced at Loeb House, Harvard University, on November 10, with excerpts screened for the first time.
On December 12, 2015, at Harvard, Shinzo Abe became the first recipient of the Boston Global Forum’s World Leader for Peace and Security Award. Eleven years later, the Shinzo Abe Initiative returns to Harvard with Shinzo Abe — What Would He Do Today?, a twenty-minute film produced by AIWS Film and Culture Park that asks the question his allies still ask: if he were alive, what would he do for the world today?
Part One: The Decisions. The film follows the decisive moments of his leadership—his resignation in 2007 and his return; the 2015 security legislation; the first meeting with President-elect Donald Trump in November 2016; the North Korean missile over Hokkaido in August 2017—to Nara on July 8, 2022, told in silence. Three people who worked beside him speak to BGF on camera: Taniguchi Tomohiko, his adviser and speechwriter; Nakayama Yasuhide, his ally on defense and security; and Seko Hiroshige, his long-time communications strategist.
Part Two: The Question. Abe’s record points forward. At Davos in January 2019 he proposed Data Free Flow with Trust, and the G20 he hosted in Osaka that June took it up: trust as the foundation of the digital age, years before the race for AI began. His Free and Open Indo-Pacific made openness a commitment of security. Part Two carries that record into the AI Age—peace and security when a leader’s voice can be fabricated in seconds, trust infrastructure among democracies, and the Constitution for Humanity in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.
Every image of Shinzo Abe in the film is real: videos the Government of Japan has made available to the public, and BGF’s own record. No AI recreates his face or his voice, and he speaks no word he did not say. Part Two is BGF’s vision, drawn from his record and marked as such, with symbolic imagery created at AIWS Lumina Lab. In a season when fabricated messages from leaders threaten democracies, this is how a leader should be honored.
“A leader’s legacy is not what we imagine he would say. It is what his record still asks of us.”
BGF Conference 2026 · Tuesday, November 10, 2026, 11:50 AM · Loeb House, Harvard University
