No moment reveals new Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba’s character better than his decision to challenge Shinzo Abe for the leadership of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in 2018.
In 2018, Abe was six years into his second premiership and, despite some scandals that weighed on his approval ratings, he was completely dominant at home and an increasingly celebrated statesman abroad. The LDP had changed its rules and enabled Abe to run for a third three-year term as the party’s president, which would allow him to stay in the premiership long enough to become Japan’s longest-serving prime minister. It was unthinkable that the LDP would deny him another term.
No moment reveals new Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba’s character better than his decision to challenge Shinzo Abe for the leadership of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in 2018.
In 2018, Abe was six years into his second premiership and, despite some scandals that weighed on his approval ratings, he was completely dominant at home and an increasingly celebrated statesman abroad. The LDP had changed its rules and enabled Abe to run for a third three-year term as the party’s president, which would allow him to stay in the premiership long enough to become Japan’s longest-serving prime minister. It was unthinkable that the LDP would deny him another term.
And yet Ishiba decided to run against him. Though he once served Abe loyally despite an upset defeat at Abe’s hands in the LDP’s September 2012 leadership contest, Ishiba had grown increasingly disenchanted with the prime minister. Ishiba thought that Abenomics—the prime minister’s economic program—mostly benefited big corporations and big cities and increased inequality, while Abe’s national security reforms sidestepped a more substantial debate about how Japan should defend itself.
More fundamentally, Ishiba was also dismayed by Abe’s heavy-handed style of leadership, particularly in the face of credible accusations of influence-peddling and abuses of power. He wanted Abe to answer for these concerns, campaigning during the 2018 contest on a slogan of “honesty and justice” that Abe’s allies recognized as a sly attack on the prime minister and his scandals.
Although Ishiba performed better than expected, Abe won comfortably, as expected.
Ishiba paid a steep price for his opposition to Abe. In the eight years since, before becoming prime minister this month, Ishiba had held no post in the cabinet or LDP leadership. He had earned the enmity of Abe’s most devoted supporters—they accused Ishiba of backstabbing him—which no doubt contributed to a distant third-place finish in the leadership election that followed Abe’s resignation in 2020.
He was a man out of step with his own party, but he was nevertheless unwilling to compromise his views on what he believed were the grave errors of Abe’s premiership.
It was thus a surprise when Ishiba, despite a reputation for being friendless in the party and hated by a still-powerful right wing, defeated Sanae Takaichi, perhaps Abe’s most dutiful lieutenant, by a mere fifteen-vote margin to become leader of the LDP—and thus, Japan’s next prime minister—on Sept. 27.
Ishiba’s differences with Abe and his followers are not just a matter of policy. Rather, they reflect a more fundamental philosophical divide within the LDP.
Abe was literally the heir to a tradition in the party that sought to remove postwar constraints on Japan’s armed forces and make Japan a full-fledged great power, even if the Japanese people did not share that group’s goals or approve of their methods. Thanks to the efforts of Abe and others after the end of the Cold War, this tradition had come to dominate the party, sidelining or subsuming other schools of thought in the LDP.
Ishiba belongs to one of those rival lineages. He entered politics as a young man in the 1980s at the urging of Kakuei Tanaka, the LDP’s notorious “shadow shogun” who built a dominant political machine even as he was bogged down in legal proceedings over bribery charges stemming from the so-called Lockheed affair. While Tanaka is best known for his part in building a corrupt political machine, there was more to his politics than graft.
A self-made man from Niigata prefecture on the Sea of Japan, part of Japan’s remote “snow country,” Tanaka was determined to ensure that no part of the country was left behind by the postwar economic miracle. He wanted the LDP to use its power to build highways, bridges, and high-speed rail that would create jobs and promote development in rural backwaters like his hometown and stitch the archipelago together. He was a thoroughgoing democrat—another of his nicknames was “the commoners’ prime minister”—who stressed to Ishiba and other young politicians that they must prioritize listening to voters and their concerns, and using national power to make their lives better.
His faction dominated the LDP for most of the 1970s and 1980s but fragmented as Tanaka fought his legal battles and increasingly poor health, and then finally lost its grip on the party as corruption scandals prompted some of Tanaka’s own acolytes—Ishiba included—to break away from the LDP in pursuit of political reform and send the party into opposition for the first time in 1993.
Ishiba eventually returned to the LDP in 1997, but by that point it was a different party, already beginning the move to the right that would propel Abe to dominance.
But even as the LDP changed, Ishiba clung to the lessons he learned from Tanaka. The party had to listen to voters. It had to make life better for Japan’s most disadvantaged people and regions. And if the LDP wanted to make big changes—such as revising the Japanese Constitution or spending more on national defense—then it had to work hard and speak honestly with voters to convince them to support these goals.
It is not an accident that Ishiba has consistently been one of the most popular politicians in the LDP.
Ishiba’s attachment to Tanaka is not the only thing that sets him apart in the contemporary LDP. He also has idiosyncratic views about the role that Japan should play in the world. Unlike Tanaka, whose wartime service in Manchuria made him deeply skeptical of rearmament and eager to assert Japan’s independence from the United States during the Cold War, Ishiba is not a pacifist. Indeed, he has referred to himself as a “military otaku,” using a Japanese term for a fanatical nerd to reference his own unusually high degree of enthusiasm for military affairs for a Japanese lawmaker.
But while Abe and his followers sought to strengthen Japan’s armed forces as part of a project of national greatness, Ishiba is interested in defending his country and its people. Japan should be capable enough to defend itself from military threats, reducing its dependence on a United States that could endanger Tokyo through recklessness or fecklessness. To be sure, Ishiba is not opposed to Japan’s alliance with the United States, but he wants Japan to be a full-fledged, independent partner, including potentially in the management of a nuclear deterrent.
What he does not want is for Japan to compete for power for its own sake or to focus exclusively on the military balance in East Asia; he has emphasized the importance of diplomacy and commerce in Japan’s relationships with China, South Korea, and other regional powers alongside the pursuit of military power, even calling for greater humility from Japan regarding its wartime past.
This philosophical divide was laid bare during the September LDP leadership election. Ishiba ran on a platform emphasizing for safety and security for the Japanese people; Takaichi’s slogan was “strengthening comprehensive national power.” Between these two platforms are some of the most enduring fault lines in postwar Japanese politics, which in the 21st century could mean the difference between a Japanese government that tolerates and accommodates relative decline and one that takes extraordinary measures—and risks—to reverse it.
It is for this reason that it is difficult to be optimistic about Ishiba’s prospects. Abe might be gone, but his ideas and his intellectual successors continue to play an outsized role in the party that he dominated from 2012 until his death in 2022, even if Abe’s faction itself has been shattered by some of its members’ participation in a slush fund scheme that concealed political funds transfers.
Ishiba’s victory by no means marks their final defeat; Takaichi may already be preparing for another leadership bid. But it may also have been less of a victory for Ishiba’s anti-Abe vision or Takaichi’s pro-Abe vision than it was an opportunistic bet by vulnerable LDP lawmakers who thought his enduring popularity with voters might protect their seats—and a bet by his predecessor, Fumio Kishida, that Ishiba would protect his legacy more than Takaichi.
Thus, while Ishiba won, he is still isolated within his own party. He spent his first week as the head of the LDP walking back his opposition to Abenomics—not least because Kishida carried forward Abe’s economic program—and expressing tolerance toward LDP lawmakers implicated in a campaign finance scandal centered on Abe’s own faction, the very expression of the power-at-all-costs style of politics that Ishiba so vociferously rejected in 2018.
These compromises may have been unavoidable. Takaichi and her followers now constitute an internal opposition within the LDP’s ranks, a potent source of rebellion if Ishiba deviates too far from the Abe line. But these steps could also undermine his reputation as an idealistic truth-teller determined to create a more democratic politics—the very reason that he has persisted in politics—which could not only weaken his premiership just as it gets started, but could also risk his government’s majority in the snap election that he is preparing to call for on Oct. 27. It may be too heavy a task for any politician, particularly one with Ishiba’s history, to build a new, post-Abe LDP when so much of the party remains committed to Abe’s political vision.
Nevertheless, even if Ishiba himself fails in his pursuit of a new LDP, his victory has laid bare the conflict at the heart of Japan’s ruling party. The LDP’s reckoning with the costs of Abe’s relentless pursuit of power at home and abroad will shape Japan’s politics for years to come.
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