Former defense minister Ishiba Shigeru won his bid for leadership of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) on Friday, all but guaranteeing he will become the next prime minister.
Ishiba, 67, made four previous attempts to win leadership of the party. He was first elected to the Japanese parliament in 1986. He did a stint as agriculture minister, held a few other cabinet-level posts, and had a successful career as a banker before getting into politics, but he is primarily known as a defense policy expert.
Ishiba is a staunch supporter of Taiwan, wants to build training bases for the Japanese Self-Defense Force (JSDF) in the continental United States, and aspires to create an Asian version of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) – all positions that are guaranteed to annoy China.
It took Ishiba five tries to win the leadership post because something in his iconoclastic mix of views is guaranteed to alienate every faction within the LDP, Japan’s ruling party for the past seven decades. He is a defense hawk in a country that inclines toward pacifism, he broke with conservatives by supporting same-sex marriage, he antagonized the LDP by defecting to an opposition group for a few years in the 1990s, and he was one of the louder voices calling for incumbent Prime Minister Kishida Fumio to step down.
Ishiba was strongly opposed to nuclear power at a time when Japan, like other industrialized nations, has come to see it as a necessary part of any serious clean energy program. It is easy to see why Japan would be particularly queasy about nuclear energy. Ishiba eventually moderated his position enough to say he would not try to force Japan’s existing reactors to shut down.
“I have undoubtedly hurt many people’s feelings, caused unpleasant experiences and made many suffer. I sincerely apologize for all of my shortcomings,” Ishiba said when he launched what he described as his “final battle” for party leadership.
The new prime-minister-in-waiting has criticized Japan’s partners in the United States a few times, notably demanding for more oversight of U.S. bases in Japan, asking for Japan to have a seat at the table when decisions about U.S. nuclear weapons deployment are made, and pushing back against American resistance to Japanese company Nippon Steel’s $14.9 billion bid to buy U.S. Steel.
Ishiba is one of the more popular figures in his party, endearing himself to the public with a combination of policy-wonk intellectualism and oddball nerd-fu. (“Oddball” was how his own campaign manager described him).
Although he has a reputation for intellectualism, Ishiba is actually a country boy. He announced his final run for the top office in front of a Shinto shrine in his rural home prefecture of Tottori. He campaigned on bringing more money, vitality, and people into the rapidly depopulating Japanese countryside. Among other ideas, he wants to move some government ministry functions out of the big cities and headquarter them in rural areas.
Ishiba has long been a serious student of Japan’s deathbed demographic crisis. As with every other Japanese leader – and every other leader in the industrialized world – he has not figured out how to reverse demographic decline yet, but he promised to try. One of his theories is that rapid urbanization pulled too many young Japanese out of rural communities and left them feeling lonely and alienated in the big cities, so he hopes persuading people to move back to rural communities might create more young families.
No one doubts the new LDP leader’s claim that he reads three books a day and would rather be reading than rubbing shoulders with fellow politicians. He maintains a lively social media platform, from which he discourses on everything from economic theory and Indo-Pacific defense strategy to ramen noodles and karaoke. He once attended a public event dressed as an exceptionally goofy anime character because someone handed him the costume and told him to put it on. He didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings by saying “no.”
His popularity with the public might be one reason Ishiba finally won the top LDP post because his party really needs some charisma right now. Outgoing Prime Minister Kishida Fumio announced he would step down in mid-August because he felt he had lost the trust of the Japanese public due to a high inflation, a faltering economy, and a massive corruption scandal.
Ishiba has pledged to largely continue Kishida’s economic program – perhaps with a few tweaks and a greater emphasis on “fairness” – but his victory produced an immediate surge in the value of the yen. Kishida’s program might have lost a good deal of public support, but investors were much less enthused about the alternatives on offer.
Ishiba still must face a parliamentary election before becoming prime minister, but since LDP has a lock on the seats needed to fill the office with one of its own, his victory is all but guaranteed. Ishiba said on Friday he will call for a general election soon, to “seek the public’s mandate.”