Shigeru Ishiba, a veteran politician with a reputation for irking his conservative colleagues, is set to become Japan’s next prime minister after winning the leadership race for the Liberal Democratic Party Friday.
Ishiba, a 67-year-old former defense minister, defeated socially conservative foreign policy hawk Sanae Takaichi in the second round of an internal party vote. The LDP’s parliamentary majority means he will become prime minister, likely next week.
The runoff between Ishiba and Takaichi followed a first-round vote featuring a record nine candidates, reflecting a broad struggle over the direction of the LDP, which has ruled Japan for all but four of the past 65 years.
The conservative LDP has sought to relax Japan’s self-imposed, post-World War II military restraints, though the Japanese public remains largely wary of abandoning its pacifist traditions.
The choice between Ishiba and Takaichi was especially significant. While neither was expected to drastically reverse Japan’s bolder security stance, they represented different visions about how it should be pursued.
Takaichi claimed to be the ideological successor to the late prime minister, Shinzo Abe, who pushed for a more assertive Japan, often to the dismay of its neighbors.
Ishiba, however, was a prominent Abe critic who “urges humility in Japan’s approach to its history,” said Tobias Harris, a Japanese politics specialist and founder of Japan Foresight, a political risk advisory company.
Ishiba’s win represents “a rejection of a quarter century of dominance by Abe and his national greatness conservatives, the triumph of a style of politics that has been pushed to the margins of the LDP for most of Ishiba’s career,” Harris wrote in a profile of Ishiba this week.
Takaichi, considered the most conservative candidate in the race, had pledged to visit the controversial Yasukuni Shrine as prime minister. The shrine honors Japan’s war dead, including convicted war criminals. The last prime minister to visit was Abe in 2013, a move that sparked criticism from China, South Korea, and the United States.
That approach was apparently viewed as too risky for many LDP members, who worried that Japan’s international standing could become tainted, according to Mieko Nakabayashi, a former Japanese lawmaker and professor at Tokyo’s Waseda University.
“In terms of international security and international relations, the choice of Takaichi was not actually on the table if you were a decent member of the LDP,” Nakabayashi said. “LDP members thought that was too much.”
However, many analysts were skeptical about the chances of Ishiba, who on four prior occasions had tried and failed to secure the LDP's top spot. Though popular with the public, Ishiba was disliked by many of his colleagues, in large part because of his prior decision to leave the party and criticize successive LDP-led administrations, most notably Abe’s.
The result means Abe allies are now “in the backseat” of the party, said Tetsuo Kotani, a senior fellow at the Japan Institute of International Affairs.
The Abe faction had widely been blamed for a scandal involving the misuse of millions of dollars in unreported political donations. In an attempt to restore public trust following that scandal, the party dismantled most of the powerful factions that traditionally controlled the leadership votes.
The scandals helped topple outgoing Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, whose administration had also struggled to address Japan’s long-standing economic stagnation and rising inflation.
Ishiba was a vocal critic of “Abenomics,” which relied on low interest rates and government spending to stimulate growth. Instead, Ishiba has called for raising corporate taxes to promote greater wealth redistribution.
Ishiba also wants Japan to take a bigger role in his country’s alliance with the United States. He has repeatedly called for the revision of the Status of Forces Agreement governing U.S. forces in Japan.
He also has proposed the creation of an “Asian NATO,” which he says could facilitate a nuclear sharing arrangement or the return of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons to the region.
While Ishiba supports the U.S.-Japan alliance, he wants to put the relationship on a more equal playing field, said Rintaro Nishimura, an associate in the Japan practice of the Asia Group.
“His fundamental principle … is making sure that Japan is able to work with regional partners in a way that it doesn't completely rely on the United States to be engaged in a conflict with China. To be able to independently, in a sense, prepare for the worst scenario,” Nishimura said.
Ishiba may revisit some of his campaign policies that unsettled his foreign policy advisers, said Kotani, the foreign affairs specialist, who expects Ishiba to govern pragmatically.
“Ishiba is predictable,” he said. “And he will be surrounded by reasonable people.”
