The dreams of Ishin no Kai

A review of Shiota Ushio on the Osaka-based party

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Shiota Ushio / 解剖　日本維新の会 [Kaibō・Nihon Ishin no Kai] / Heibonsha, 2021

After his party had failed to best the Constitutional Democratic Party (CDP) in the two by-elections where his party fielded candidates, Baba Nobuyuki, leader of Ishin no Kai,¹ admitted that his party faces a significant challenge. “It is still very difficult to win in single-member districts outside of Kansai,” he said. But, far from being chastened, Baba used his press conference following the by-elections to reiterate Ishin’s strategy ahead of the next general election.

He said:

As we have a goal of taking control of the government independently, we will continue to make it our goal to field candidates in all electoral districts without fail.

These quotes – a dogged stubbornness in the face of persistent and frequently unyielding obstacles – more or less characterizes the history of Ishin no Kai in its various iterations dating back to the early 2010s.

As a student of Japan’s national politics, I admit that I have something of a blind spot for Kansai. When I have lived in Japan, it has exclusively been in Kantō; when I return, I spend my time in Tokyo. When I have visited the Kansai region, it has been exclusively as a tourist. As a result, I have at time struggled to know what to make of the Ishin no Kai phenomenon, dating back to its first iteration under former Osaka prefecture governor and Osaka city mayor Hashimoto Tōru. Hashimoto’s and his party’s ambitions to reshape Japanese politics have made it impossible to ignore the Osaka-based party, but its struggles have also made me question how seriously to take it as a force capable of reshaping the national political system.

To fill in some of the gaps in my knowledge of Ishin no Kai, I read veteran political journalist Shiota Ushio’s Kaibō・Nihon Ishin no Kai [解剖　日本維新の会] (Heibonsha, 2021), a measured report – published following the 2020 failure of the second referendum on merging the Osaka city and prefectural governments into a metropolis to match Tokyo – that seeks to explain the party’s history, its personalities, and its animating ideas. It is a serviceable introduction to the party, but I came away from my reading with the sense that my initial impressions of Ishin no Kai were indeed correct. The party embodies what might as well have been the dominant ideology of the Heisei period, the simultaneous pursuit of political centralization (by elevating political leaders over bureaucrats), decentralization (by shifting power from Tokyo to prefectural and local governments), and liberalization (by reducing the power of the state over the market), Japan could break out of the stagnation of the “lost decades.”

But it has never gone quite as Hashimoto or his co-founder Matsui Ichirō had hoped.

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Ishin no Kai has essentially lived three lives since Hashimoto pulled together some defectors from the local Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) to form the first Osaka Restoration Association in 2010. The first phase was the charismatic phase, during which Hashimoto’s charisma gave the party a national profile and forced other players to take it seriously. This phase culminated in the defeat of the first referendum on the party’s Osaka unification plan in May 2015, followed by Hashimoto’s retirement from politics in December 2015. The second phase was the wilderness phase, as the party fractured and struggled to find its purpose under new leaders. During the third phase, the party has weathered triumph (Osaka Governor Yoshimura Hirofumi’s highly regarded management of the Covid-19 pandemic) and defeat (the failed 2020 referendum) and is making a more determined bid for national influence than at any point since its founding.

While the party’s name, leadership, and strategy have varied through these eras, the party’s commitment to Heisei reform conservatism and a populist style of politics have been consistent through all three. The question is whether this brand of politics can succeed in the current moment.

In retrospect, the birth of Ishin no Kai emerged as a local flourishing of Koizumi-style politics. The party’s origins lie in a fracture within the Osaka branch of the LDP, as younger backbenchers in the prefectural assembly were dissatisfied with Ōta Fusae, a former Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) official the party nominated in 2000 to succeed Yokoyama Knock, a comedian-turned-politician who had served a term as governor. The prefecture and city faced a severe fiscal crisis in the wake of the bursting of the bubble, and some of the LDP’s younger assembly members, including Matsui and Asada Hitoshi thought Ōta was ineffective. They began casting about for a politician who would take bolder steps to respond to second city’s fiscal and social crisis. It was not until 2008, when Ōta was contemplating a bid for a third term, that the reformists found their candidate: Hashimoto Tōru, a lawyer and TV “talent.”

Hashimoto, initially courted by local lawmakers and LDP lawmaker Suga Yoshihide to run in Osaka’s mayoral election in late 2007, was at first reluctant to enter politics, but he changed his mind soon thereafter and decided to run in January 2008 Osaka gubernatorial election after a scandal led Ōta to decline to seek a third term. Hashimoto’s charisma and communication skills appealed to LDP backbenchers looking to shake up local politics and overcome Osaka’s challenges. He secured the backing of the LDP and Kōmeitō and won the governorship with 54% of the vote.

Hashimoto Tōru campaigns during the 2013 upper house elections. Source: Wikimedia Commons

His approach was similar to Koizumi’s “theatrics,” turning up the heat on legislative and bureaucratic opponents in pursuit of an agenda of fiscal consolidation, education and public service reform, and infrastructure reform. But less than two years into his governorship, with the LDP in opposition nationally, Hashimoto began working with Matsui and Asada to launch a local party that would pursue decentralization from the bottom up, without waiting for Tokyo. They started small, with 33 members, including 27 prefectural assembly members, one Osaka municipal assembly member, and five Sakai city assembly members. Matsui became the secretary-general, Asada the policy chief. It was the local-scale version of the new party booms that were not uncommon during the Heisei era. The party’s ethos at its birth was a perfect encapsulation of Heisei-era reform conservatism: centralization, meaning streamlining government and concentrating of power in the hands of politicians; localization, meaning the devolution of power from the national government to local governments; and privatization, meaning deregulation and the reduction of the power of government over the market.

Shiota argues that what sets Ishin apart is that it is a new style of party, set against the establishment parties. He even compares to Germany’s right-wing Alternative for Deutschland at one point. But while Ishin no Kai’s leaders fancy themselves as opposed to the traditional political establishment, the reality is more complicated. For one thing, the party’s dominance in Osaka since Hashimoto’s victory in 2008 means that locally it has become an established institution. They are hardly outsiders. That also applies to the party’s role on the national stage. The party has always been realistic about engaging with power players in Tokyo, not least when it had to work with multiple parties in 2011 and 2012 to secure the Diet’s approval of legislation that would make the party’s “One Osaka” plan possible or the national government’s support for the 2025 World Expo. Since the formation of the party’s first national wing in 2012, Ishin has persistently pursued a flexible approach to power, referring to itself as a yu-tō (ゆ党), by which it means that it is neither a government party (yo-tō, 与党) nor an opposition party (ya-tō, 野党). Shiota notes that during the second Abe administration, the party thought of itself as a source of gaiatsu (“external pressure”) on Abe Shinzō, encouraging him to be bolder in pursuing economic reform. The party was also part of the pro-constitution revision “coalition” that gave Abe the numerical strength – on paper, anyway – to pursue revision after the 2016 House of Councillors elections.

Ishin’s national ambitions have been grander than being a parliamentary adjunct to the LDP. Hashimoto and other party leaders have insisted that the goal is to forge Ishin into a reformist conservative “third force” that would eventually supplant the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) and its center-left successors to realign the Japanese party system into a two-party system pitting the “big government” LDP against the “small government” Ishin. In an interview included in the book’s appendix, Asada, Ishin’s policy “brain,” describes the party’s goal as creating a US-style two-party system with a broad consensus on foreign policy, the constitution, and energy policy but genuine contrast on economic policy, social security, and related issues.² But Ishin was hardly the first political group to pursue this goal, and in fact one of the challenges it faced in launching a national party was that the field was crowded with other players pursuing the same goal, including Ishihara Shintarō’s Sun Party, Watanabe Yoshimi’s Minna no tō, Eda Kenji’s Unity Party, and, later, Koike Yuriko’s Kibō no tō. Ishin no Kai pursued alliances and mergers with these other players, but all of these tie-ups foundered.³

Why has Ishin – which Shiota describes as Japan’s most successful regional party – failed at its bid to transform the national political system, breaking out from its regional base to become a national political force? Ultimately this is the most important question about Ishin no Kai, but it is not answered satisfactorily by Shiota. While this book is a valuable narrative account of the decision-making by party elites, it has little to say about why Kansai voters have continued to support the party even as voters in other parts of the country have largely spurned it.

For my part, I can think of a few hypotheses for why Ishin has struggled nationally. It may be that its reformist conservatism is not nearly as popular with Japanese voters as its many advocates believe. Alternatively, as other opposition parties have learned, the LDP’s big-tent ideological fluidity makes it virtually impossible to compete with the LDP on policy grounds. Also like other opposition parties – and as Shiota implies in an afterword – Ishin may have a personnel problem. Whereas the LDP’s dominance of local legislatures ensures that it has a steady supply of qualified candidates for Diet seats, Ishin has had little success at the local level outside of Kansai (and, relatedly, its dominance of local government in Osaka and its neighbors means it has quality candidates for national races in Kansai). I would also argue that Ishin no Kai has been trying to build a populist national party in what has been Japan’s post-populist era. Without an organized vote, at least outside of Kansai, to succeed nationally Ishin no Kai would need to convince independents to turn out, which it — and every other opposition party — has largely failed to do.

Ishin no Kai will likely remain a fixture in Japanese politics. Indeed, what sets Ishin no Kai apart from other Heisei-era new parties is its durability. The party has not only weathered setbacks in its governance of Osaka prefecture and Osaka city – including the defeat of referenda in 2015 and 2020 aimed at realizing the party’s goal of unifying prefectural and city governments into a Tokyo-style metropolis – it has also maintained a national role even as it has at times faced significant headwinds.

But there is little reason to think that party will be able to realize its dream of party realignment or becoming a “third force.” Ultimately, it is easiest to imagine Ishin no Kai as an eventual junior coalition partner of the LDP, particularly if Kōmeitō’s strength fades, a regional curiosity rather than a force for political transformation. Depending on the outcome of the next general election, Ishin’s leaders may face this choice sooner rather than later.

1. The party has used several different names in Japanese since its foundation, but I refer to it simply as Ishin no Kai in this piece for the sake of clarity.

2. This understanding of the US party system is a bit dated, to say the least, even though the interview was conducted in June 2021.

3. The Koike partnership in 2017 was particularly disastrous, resulting in Ishin’s winning only eleven seats in the 2017 general election, behind even the Japanese Communist Party.