Trial Balloons

Throughout his political career, Ishiba, who was born in 1957 and first elected to the Diet in 1986, had been a faithful member of the conservative LDP-led governments that have ruled the country almost without a break since 1955. From time to time, he served in ministerial posts, including defense and agriculture. Like many conservatives, he belonged to emperor-focused Diet organizations such as Japan Conference (Nippon Kaigi) and the Shinto Politics League that could be described as “far right.”

At the same time, he was an unquestioning believer in the US alliance, absolutely committed to maintaining Japan’s position of subordination to the United States. He supported the policies of the Abe Shinzō government that held office from 2012 to 2020: doubling defense expenditure, militarizing the China-facing Southwest Islands, and further entrenching the US military presence in its chain of bases dotted throughout the Japanese archipelago.

From time to time, both before and after taking office as PM, Ishiba put forward his idea of Japan at the center of a new, Asian security framework, an “Asian NATO.” On the eve of his taking office, Ishiba spelled out his thinking in some detail in a statement to a US think tank, the Hudson Institute.

In Ishiba’s vision, he would stretch the “NATO” frame around the US-Japan axis so as to incorporate other regional states. If the NATO precedent is to be followed, Japan, like European countries such as Germany, Belgium, or Turkey, would “jointly” (with the United States) possess nuclear weapons and delivery systems. Ishiba’s “bottom line” was that a nuclear Japan was “essential to deter China” and “the nuclear alliance of China, Russia, and North Korea.”

The proposal to somehow build East Asian security on the basis of nuclear confrontation between its two major powers should have been shocking but passed with little attention. Ishiba assured his American audience that his government would continue with existing policy settings.

In this context, while the US-Japan Security Treaty — adopted in 1951, revised in 1960 — was crucial, he also mentioned “quasi-alliance” relationships with Canada, Australia, the Philippines, India, France, and the UK. He meant that Japan understood its role and would do what was required of it as dependent US client state, although he would not use that term, falling back on euphemisms about “burden-sharing” and “equalizing” the relationship.

In any case, no sooner did Ishiba announce his proposed NATO-like regional security frame to the Hudson Institute than the Biden administration in Washington threw cold water on it. It appears to have been a balloon floated without first securing approval from Washington.

Election Outcomes

Ishiba’s LDP suffered a severe drubbing in the election on October 27 but survived. In the proportional sector vote, the party’s vote fell by more than five million (from 19.9 million in 2021 to 14.5 million in 2024). Its long-term coalition partner, the neo-Buddhist Komeito, likewise dropped, from 7.1 million votes to a little under 6 million.

The LDP’s seat share in the Lower House went from 259 before the election to 191 afterward, and its losses included the party’s most recognizably “rightist” elements, those closest to former prime minister Abe Shinzō. With Komeito dropping from thirty-two to twenty-four seats, for a total of 215 between the two parties, the coalition was well short of the 233 it needed for a parliamentary majority.

As for the major opposition groupings, the Constitutional Democratic Party only saw modest growth in its vote but won fifty extra seats, rising from 98 to 148. Reiwa Shinsengumi, the left-inclined populist party headed by the popular former actor Yamamoto Taro, increased its vote from 2.2 million to 3.8 million and won nine seats. The party, which offered refreshingly radical social and economic policies, takes its name from the radical samurai “Shinsengumi” of the 1860s, reborn to address the crisis of the Reiwa era, the reign that commenced in 2019.

The Democratic Party for the People (Kokumin Minshutō) had the backing of the national labor organization, Rengo, having promised to increase wages. It more than doubled its vote and quadrupled its number of MPs, rising from seven to twenty-eight. The LDP and Komeito eventually struck a deal with this party to say in power as a minority government. The center-right (or simply rightist) Japan Innovation Party lost nearly three million votes, and its Diet representation fell from forty-four to thirty-eight.

The Japanese Communist Party (JCP) also saw its vote fall and lost two of its ten seats. As the JCP struggled to articulate a line that would preserve something of its radical past while adapting to the times, its message became hard to distinguish from that of other vaguely reform-oriented parties. Overall, the trend of the election was away from the established parties and ideological agendas, whether LDP or JCP, and toward those that focused on quotidian matters: the cost of living, taxation levels, and stagnant wage growth.

In this election, despite the extension of voting rights to eighteen-year-olds by a 2015 law, nearly half of those eligible did not bother to vote. The 53.8 percent participation rate was the third-lowest on record. Women accounted for just over one in five candidates (23 percent), well up from 5.7 percent in 2021 but still low by international standards. In the Inter-Parliamentary Union’s comparative tables of women in national parliaments, Japan ranks at joint 140th with Tunisia.

Overall, one could say that the Japanese people have responded lethargically to the major problems facing the country in the century’s third decade. As wars rage and spread, the confrontation between the United States and China deepens, and the tempo of war games in the East and South China Seas accelerates, the Japanese electorate does not seem to have reached any consensus on a reform path or a way forward. Voters seemed not to see anything ominous in the county’s rapid military expansion and the talk at high levels of hosting nuclear weapons.

Japan and the United States

Although Ishiba had followed the policies he inherited from Abe Shinzō of large-scale military expansion and commitment to a US-dependent regional and global role, there were also hints that he might be dissatisfied with Japan’s dependent position and with Abe’s militarism and clientelism. In certain important respects, Ishiba’s is an unusually liberal profile for a Japanese politician.

On social matters, including the question of same-sex marriage, he has been a moderate, mildly progressive figure, as he has on historical questions and on Japan’s relations with its neighbors. When it comes to Japan’s record of colonialism and aggression, it is hard to imagine any other Japanese political figure who could say, as Ishiba did in in a blog post from August 2019: “Our postwar failure to directly face our problem in the war has caused a lot of problems.”

He also made the following reference to Japan’s annexation of Korea in a book published just before he became PM:

Without an understanding of how much injury the merger caused to the pride and national identity of the Korean people, Japan and South Korea can never build a genuine partnership based on trust.

On the crucial question of the US alliance, he is of course supportive. No politician in Japan could be anything else.

With Ishiba, as with most prominent conservative political figures, the potential exists for a clash between alliance commitments to the United States on the one hand and attachment to the emperor-centered Japanese ideology propagated by groups such as Japan Conference on the other. Furthermore, even though he affirms the alliance with Washington, Ishiba sees it as unequal and in need of reform.

This is an improbable position, since “equality” would surely call for Japan to become a nuclear great power. But even setting that point aside, the grim truth is that the United States does not allow equal relations with any other state.

One window onto the relationship opened in late 2023 over Nippon Steel’s projected $15 billion purchase of the troubled giant US Steel. It offended national pride for such a major US institution to be subject to Japanese “takeover.” Both Joe Biden and Donald Trump opposed the deal, with Trump promising to “instantaneously, absolutely” block any acquisition if he returned to the White House.

Ishiba’s comment on this was unusually forthright:

I find what the United States is saying (about Nippon Steel) to be very unsettling, making such statements or actions that could undermine the trust of its allies. . . . Recently the US is tending to impose deals and threats even on its allies. This is true not only with NATO countries but also now with Japan. I question whether that is really a fair approach. It is extremely important for the Japanese government to discuss these matters sincerely, earnestly, and logically.

The general expectation of the incoming US administration is that once he takes office, Trump will honor his promise to block the deal. Tokyo, while no doubt hoping for a Trump relationship marked by sincerity, earnestness, and logic, has to brace itself for the imposition of “deals and threats,” as Ishiba put it.

An Unusual Model

As Ishiba prepares for the transition in Washington, he appears to have chosen a remarkable political model. In June 2024, he became a founding member of the supra-party “Ishibashi Tanzan Research Society,” an organization of Diet members committed to the ideas and principles of the noted economist and liberal journalist-politician (1884–1973).

Ishibashi served a brief term as prime minister from December 1956 to February 1957, which was cut short by illness. But his influence waned after it, and his significance has tended to go unrecognized. His radicalism, as we must call it, and his dissent from the establishment of his day over the direction of the Japanese state dated back to World War I.

In 1914, Japan took advantage of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance (1902–21) to declare war on Germany, appropriating the German concession areas in China’s Shandong province. It also attempted to impose an infamous set of “Twenty-One Demands” on the government of China. Ishibashi’s was a rare critical voice. A “small Japan,” he urged, was much preferrable to a “Great” (or “Greater”) one.

Three decades later, in the contest that followed Japan’s postwar restoration of sovereignty under the San Francisco Treaty of 1951, Ishibashi’s “small Japan” line contrasted with the alternative best represented by his successor as PM, Kishi Nobusuke, who guided the country toward the position of a subservient US client state. While Ishibashi had been an opponent of Japanese imperial expansion after World War I, Kishi was a key figure in building and administering the empire. The problem for Ishiba is how to bring together the complex and sometimes contradictory legacies of his predecessors in a coherent form.

The Ishibashi organization in the Diet quickly grew to more than one hundred members. In addition to Ishiba himself, they included Foreign Minister Iwaya Takeshi, Defense Minister Nakatani Gen, General Affairs Minister Murakami Seiichirō, and Justice Minister Furukawa Yoshihisa. Ishiba and others of his circle seem not to recognize the contradiction between Ishibashi’s utopian twentieth-century vision of a “small,” independent Japan and the brutally realist contemporary vision of regional security that Ishiba articulated to the Hudson Institute, based on nuclear confrontation between rival alliance systems led by Japan and China.

The problem Ishiba will face in 2025 is the very problem that his predecessors wrestled in vain to address in the past: how to serve Washington and the Japanese people at the same time. Unable to resolve that contradiction, sooner or later he is bound to fall victim to it.