Nothing a reshuffle can fix

New cabinet won't solve Kishida's problems

Prime Minister Kishida Fumio, his numbers stubbornly low and the clock ticking on the final year of his term as president of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), has reshuffled his cabinet and the LDP leadership.

There is a whiff of desperation surrounding the prime minister, who has struggled to get any kind of momentum that might enable him to call a snap election that could give him a new lease on political life. He spent the days leading up to the decision consulting extensively with senior party leaders, including two meetings with Hagiuda Kōichi, one of the bosses of the Abe faction, reflecting Kishida’s continuing dependence on the party’s largest grouping.

As with the many of the late Abe Shinzō’s reshuffles, Kishida has largely preserved a core executive group in cabinet and party. Matsuno Hirokazu (Abe) stays on as chief cabinet secretary, while Suzuki Shunichi (Asō) will remain at the finance ministry and Nishimura Yasutoshi (Abe) at METI. In the party leadership, Motegi Toshimitsu (Motegi) will continue to serve as the LDP’s secretary-general, and Hagiuda stays as policy chief. Kishida will also keep his two rivals from the 2021 leadership election in “special mission” ministerial posts, with Kōno Tarō (Asō) continuing as digital affairs minister and Takaichi Sanae (independent) remaining as economic security minister. Kishida’s inner circle is not entirely unchanged: Kihara Seiji (Kishida), the deputy chief cabinet secretary who has been the intellectual locomotive for Kishida’s main domestic policy initiatives, asked to be replaced after spending the summer fighting scandal allegations. Kihara, however, is not going too far, as he will be serving in the LDP simultaneously as a deputy secretary-general and deputy policy chief under Motegi and Hagiuda respectively. And Kihara will be succeeded by Murai Hideki (Kishida), until now a prime minister’s aide who, like Kihara, is a former finance ministry bureaucrat who belongs to the prime minister’s faction.¹

It is not a particularly impressive reshuffle and seems unlikely that it will fix Kishida’s troubles. Nevertheless, there are three differences worth noting in the new lineup.

First, Kishida naturally drew attention for including a record-tying five women in his cabinet, including new Foreign Minister Kamikawa Yōko (Kishida) – although Kamikawa is the only one of the five heading a major ministry. The other four, including Takaichi, are either heading minor agencies (Tsuchiya Shinako as reconstruction minister) or serving as special mission ministers (Jimi Hanako, holding the regional revitalization, Okinawa, and Northern Territories portfolios). Kishida’s most notable female appointee, however, is not the in the cabinet at all. Obuchi Yuko, who was one of the record-setting five women in a reshuffled Abe cabinet in 2014, resigned as METI minister a little more than a month after her appointment due to a campaign finance scandal. Nine years later Kishida has named her the LDP’s election strategy chair, making her the first woman to ever hold the post. Obuchi’s rehabilitation has been surprisingly long – it is easy to think of male politicians who resigned due to scandal who nevertheless found their way back into good standing swiftly – and it seems as much about Kishida wanting to tap a young (forty-nine), female political talent to organize the party’s campaign efforts ahead of a general election that still seems likely in the near future. Whether anything comes of her appointment, her rehabilitation means that eventually she will once again be a serious contender for higher office and perhaps even the premiership.

Also notable is how many members of the new cabinet are first-time ministers: eleven of nineteen are joining the cabinet for the first time. Of those eleven, all but four are sixty-five or older, suggesting that these are less about merit than honors for long-serving backbenchers. These appointments are never without risk. These ministers often have either scandals in their closets that quickly find their way into tabloids or are short of expertise, occasionally resulting in embarrassing gaffes in parliamentary questioning. This group is unlikely to make or break the Kishida government, but by doling out the most of the ministerial posts to newcomers, Kishida has prioritized making the party at the expense of a cabinet lineup that might be more compelling to the public.

Finally, Kishida turned over both the foreign affairs and defense portfolios, replacing Foreign Minister Hayashi Yoshimasa with Kamikawa and Defense Minister Hamada Yasukazu with Kihara Minoru (Motegi). Both are known in Washington – Kamikawa studied at the Harvard Kennedy School and worked as a staffer for Senator Max Baucus – and are unlikely to depart from Kishida’s prevailing foreign and defense policies. But replacing Hayashi with Kamikawa may have been a sound political move for Kishida, in that it replaces Hayashi, a lightning rod for the right wing, with another member of Kishida’s faction who, during her two stints as Abe’s justice minister, won Abe’s admiration for decisively carrying out death sentences, including of Aum Shinrikyo leader Asahara Shoko.² Kihara, meanwhile, was a prime minister’s aide for national security at the end of Abe’s tenure as prime minister.

Ultimately, there is little about this new lineup that addresses Kishida’s most fundamental problems. The prime minister sits atop of a restless party that has accepted Kishida for lack of a better alternative. Now, however, some of those alternatives might be taking shape – at the same time that the public is starting to take a closer look at Ishin no Kai as an LDP alternative –and Kishida has not figured out how to make himself indispensable to either the LDP or the public.

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I apologize for the silence here. There has been a lot I want to write about, but I have had a full plate, not least because I was finishing up work on new material for the paperback edition of The Iconoclast, which will be published in the coming months. Stay tuned for more information about that, and perhaps a giveaway or two.

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1. And in the interest of full disclosure, Murai and I studied together in graduate school. Nice to see good things happen to old friends.

2. This comes from a column by Sankei writer and Abe biographer Abiru Rui (paywalled).