Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and Acting Deputy Secretary of Defense Christine Fox host a meeting with Shigeru Ishiba, Diet Member and Secretary General of the Liberal Democratic Party at the Pentagon May 1, 2014. Official DoD photo by Sgt. Aaron Hostutler USMC (Released).
Japanese ministers have chosen a “plainspoken populist” as the country’s next Prime Minister. Philip Patrick reports in The Spectator:
The sixty-seven-year-old Shigeru Ishiba will become Japan’s new prime minister on October 1 after winning a surprisingly exciting play-off vote against his rival Sanae Takaichi. For a moment it looked as if Japanese MPs were set to elect the country’s first female leader (Takaichi was ahead of Ishiba in the first round of voting) but in the end the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) opted for experience and former defense minister Ishiba’s safe, and crucially clean pair of hands.
Ishiba is at first glance a typical Japanese politician and an unexciting choice for PM. He’s a former banker and has been in politics for nearly forty years. He doesn’t have a particularly interesting backstory or much in the way of charisma. He looked like the dullest of the final three candidates. The other two were fun: Takaichi was once in a heavy metal band and is a Margaret Thatcher acolyte, and Shinjiro Koizumi (son of former PM Junichiro) has boy band looks and was given to amusing Kamala-esque word salad pronouncements. His (sarcastic) nickname was “the poet.”
But Ishiba is a bit more interesting than he appears and is far from a conventional LDP seat filler. The reason he has failed so often (this was his fifth tilt at the top job) is ascribed to his willingness to criticize his colleagues and go his own way. Described as a “plain spoken populist” by TIME magazine and ‘blunt” and “arrogant and condescending to his fellow lawmakers” by Jeff Kingston of Asia University, Ishiba is smart and tough and doesn’t suffer fools gladly.
He once did the unthinkable and actually left the LDP, Japan’s eternal party of government, and was briefly a member of something called the New Frontier Party before returning to the fold. He publicly criticized LDP royalty such as the late Shinzo Abe and is reportedly hated by another former PM and current panjandrum Taro Aso. Some in his own party have even called him a traitor.
Read more here.
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