Shigeru Ishiba has moved quickly to set his stamp on Japanese politics, officially becoming prime minister and calling a snap general election for Oct. 27.
The newly minted prime minister — who won the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s intraparty leadership race last Friday and was officially approved as premier by the Diet on Tuesday — caught the opposition on the back foot with the plan for a quick vote.
Analysts call it a bold ploy: The conservative ruling party’s four-year term in office started in 2021, meaning Mr. Ishiba could have been delayed until October 2025.
However, it had been widely predicted that the new LDP leader would call an early election, with the risks offset by potential positive outcomes for Mr. Ishiba.
The LDP veteran is turning to the voters at the earliest, freshest stage of his administration. That fact alone would help overcome negative public perceptions of the scandal-racked LDP.
“It is important for the new administration to be judged by the people as soon as possible,” Mr. Ishiba told a press conference at LDP headquarters in Tokyo on Tuesday.
The challenge of fighting a general election also will force those LDP lawmakers who did not support Mr. Ishiba in the leadership contest to close ranks, cementing over fractures that opened up during the nine-candidate leadership race.
Mr. Ishiba has moved quickly. In addition to calling the election, he has spent the last days forging a new Cabinet, one notable for its collection of defense and U.S. experts.
But though he has chosen two of his LDP leadership race rivals for Cabinet positions, his chief competitor in last Friday’s contest, hard-line conservative Sanae Takaichi is not among them.
Mr. Ishiba may also be calculating that the main opposition — which, like the LDP, held its internal leadership race — is ill-prepared to fight a general election at present.
The secretary general of the opposition Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, Junya Ogawa, expressed outrage at Mr. Ishiba’s election decision.
“It is an unprecedented and extremely unusual move,” Mr. Ogawa said in the Diet on Tuesday, according to Japanese media. “There are constitutional questions, and we demand an apology and a retraction.”
Opposition figures say that they have not had time to consider the new prime minister’s policies and analysts note the main opposition has not had time to discuss electoral strategies with smaller parties.
However, the Lower House of the Diet — controlled by the LDP and its coalition partner party, Komeito — voted for the move.
Rin Nishimura, Japan Associate of strategic advisory firm The Asia Group, writing on X, argued that Mr. Ishiba’s “early election announcement may already be paying off, as opposition … scramble to coordinate candidates amongst each other ahead of a campaign just weeks away.”
The LDP looks to have a firm grip on power, with the opposition widely regarded as hapless.
“They did rather badly in government from 2009-2012 and there was a split in the party in 2017,” said John Nilsson-Wright, who heads the Japan and Koreas Program at Cambridge University. “Their competency has been seriously undermined.”
Within his party, Mr. Ishiba is known — not always positively — for being a blunt speaker. Respected as a defense and foreign affairs expert, he is expected to upgrade current warming ties with South Korea and is popular in Taiwan as well.
Mr. Ishiba visited Taiwan in August, and received immediate congratulations from Taiwanese President William Lai on winning the LDP leadership race.
He has been critical of the visits of some LDP members to Yasukuni Shrine, where Japan’s war dead — including a handful of war criminals — are enshrined. The visits have been an emotive flash point in both South Korea and China.
He received immediate congratulations from Taiwanese President William Lai. “With Shigeru Ishiba now at the helm in Tokyo, Taiwan may have found a crucial ally in its quest to maintain sovereignty and peace in an increasingly tense region,” the Taiwan News wrote in an editorial.
Elsewhere, however, Mr. Ishiba has raised some eyebrows.
He is a proponent of an Asia-wide defense alliance based on NATO, which some believe is premature, given the multiple cultural and political cleavages within the region’s democracies.
“I can’t see Japan and Korea agreeing on a common enemy, and public opinion in Japan has been much more vociferous over Ukraine than Korean public opinion,” said Mr. Nilsson-Wright.
But Japan has been seriously unnerved by Russia’s war on Ukraine. Mr. Ishiba, writing in a piece for the Hudson Institute in September, complained that the Biden administration in the run-up to Russia’s invasion had consistently ruled out using U.S. and NATO troops to defend Ukraine, which is not a member of the alliance.
“Ukraine today is Asia tomorrow,” Mr. Ishiba warned. “Replacing Russia with China and Ukraine with Taiwan, the absence of a collective self-defense system like NATO in Asia means that wars are likely to break out because there is no obligation for mutual defense.”
He has also called for a renegotiation of the Status of Forces Agreement that governs the legal status of U.S. troops in Japan, including joint management of U.S. bases. Many Japanese are dissatisfied with the basing agreement, which has been strained by a number of sexual and violent crimes committed by U.S. personnel in Japan.
Arguing that the Japan-U.S. defense relationship be upgraded to the status of the British-U.S. defense partnership, he suggested stationing Japanese forces in Guam.
Japan is home to the largest single contingent of GIs outside the continental U.S. Mr. Ishiba indicated that stationing Japanese forces in Guam would be one way to address that imbalance.
In his Hudson piece, Mr. Ishiba referred to Japan becoming an “ordinary nation” — code for Japan being released from the shackles of its pacifist constitution, granting it the kind of military freedom of action it has not enjoyed since World War II.
In the last decade, Japan has been creeping forward, carefully and quietly, on issues such as collective security and rearmament.
However, to become a so-called ordinary nation, constitutional change would be needed. It is widely believed that the weighty political challenges required by that process make it practically impossible.
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