Japan’s Leadership Race Is a Puppet-Show

It’s election season again in Japan—kind of. A new prime minister is set to be chosen on September 27. In reality, though, the race is a farce, and Japan’s democracy is a sham. Washington calls the shots here.

Politicians in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), especially those who are vying for the top job, don’t dare mention it, however. There’s a deafening silence surrounding the fact that Japan is Washington’s imperial pawn—a silence made all the more necessary because the LDP was created and still exists to keep Japan under Washington’s control.

Japan’s current prime minister, Kishida Fumio, has long been in the polling death-rattle zone. Inflation, stalled wage hikes, and, above all, a long string of money-in-politics scandals have sunk his prospects of returning to power were he to gamble on a snap election. Recently, Kishida finally faced facts, accepted that his political days are numbered, and announced that he would not be seeking another term in office.

Not long thereafter, a record nine politicians in the LDP secured the necessary twenty recommendations from within the party and began to circle the lame-duck prime minister, all of them coveting that which he can no longer hold.

Meanwhile, four candidates from the opposition Constitutional Democratic Party (CDP) held their race to head that group. Noda Yoshiko, a former prime minister, is a long shot to replace Kishida as prime minister, as the CDP would first have to dislodge the unpopular but deeply entrenched LDP from power and secure a parliamentary majority in order for their party leader to become the political head of Japan. Still, in total, including the CDP candidates, there were a record thirteen people, from just two political parties, eyeing the party’s top political job. Democracy, it would seem, is in full flower.

Yet, on closer inspection, there is nothing democratic at all about the upcoming LDP election; it reveals, if anything, the utter intellectual and moral bankruptcy of Japan’s fake, Washington-imposed postwar democracy.

The bankruptcy of the postwar regime was harder to see until recently. When the furor around last year’s political scandals subsided, the factions that once streamlined who got what political post, namely the party bosses in the LDP (a political machine midwifed into existence by the CIA and then funded by the same for decades), could no longer decide on the next prime minister as before. 

But now that scandal has weakened the LDP, and Kishida has exposed it as Washington’s willing handmaiden, it is clear that Japanese politics is an exercise in mass deception, and delusion. The LDP, in fact the entire Diet in Tokyo, is little more than a diorama for pretending at democratic self-rule. Real power is behind the scenes, and doubly so. There are the party bosses, yes. But behind them there is Washington. 

For nearly 80 years, Washington has “guaranteed” Japan’s security. This means that Washington owns Japan. Politicians here work, ultimately, for American power. The military occupation of the country continues. A “Japan-U.S. Joint Committee,” for instance, meets regularly so that American overlords may convey their will to Japanese bureaucrats, who in turn implement it. The final political word here is Washington’s, not the Japanese voters’; they get merely to pretend to have a say in their own country’s affairs.

Not only that, but very few people in Japan even get to vote for prime minister in the first place. Suffrage in LDP elections is limited to party members. While there are about 1.05 million dues-paying LDP members nationwide, votes are weighted such that LDP politicians in the Diet get, collectively, as many votes as their more than one million copartisans. And the party vote, in any case, is largely perfunctory, not just because the system is rigged internally, but because there is only one vote that really counts in Japanese politics—that of the American ambassador. Without Washington’s nod, nobody gets into the big LDP chair.

Consider the case of Ishiba Shigeru, a longtime LDP heavyweight and former defense minister who is running for the prime minister position this year. In late 2023, a colleague and I interviewed Ishiba. He struck us as well-informed, competent, intelligent, and thoughtful. Ishiba was an outsider when the late Abe Shinzo was in power, in part because Ishiba would not play faction politics, instead preferring to build coalitions without regard to the stables of junior politicians under the sway of this or that senior kingmaker. Factions are theoretically gone now, a casualty of the post-Abe era in which it was discovered that many in Abe’s camp had been skimming cash (much of it from Chinese and other foreigners) from tickets sold to political meet-and-greet events. 

But Ishiba res unelectable. To be sure, Ishiba is well-liked among the men and women on the street. He often comes in first in public opinion polls, and this time is no different. Out of nine candidates, Japanese voters say they want Ishiba most. Koizumi Shinjiro, son of former prime minister Koizumi Junichiro, trails Ishiba by six points. But when Koizumi Jr. went surfing with U.S. Ambassador Rahm Emanuel in July, it was obvious whom Washington had anointed as its next Herod in the Far East. Ishiba has no chance.

Then there is Takaichi Sanae, who is running a surprisingly strong race and polling well inside the LDP. Takaichi has spent years carefully crafting her political persona: rock-ribbed conservative, rising sun patriot, and one of just a handful of politicians brave enough to defy Washington and visit Yasukuni Shrine, where Japan’s war dead are honored. (Nothing irks Washington more than being reminded that millions have chosen to die fighting rather than be ruled by Potomac imperial-liberals.) In terms of political positioning, many conservatives in Japan are arguing, Takaichi would be an excellent tonic to the long reign of milquetoast Washington patsy Kishida.

But Takaichi’s political persona is, of course, negotiable. Posturing to get into office is one thing, but it seems clear that Takaichi will dance to Washington’s tune if elected to the top spot. For example, she has given indications recently that she will not visit Yasukuni if she becomes prime minister. This willingness to do Washington’s bidding makes her at least a plausible candidate. Takaichi, too, it must be remembered, voted for the Washington-forced LGBT bill last year. Another mark in her favor on Emanuel’s scorecard. And, like every other candidate the LDP is fielding this round, she has said almost nothing about the elephant in the room, namely that the American ambassador runs her country like an overseas branch office.

Not just Takaichi. Nobody in the race to take the prime minister’s position says a word about the political reality in this deeply undemocratic country, this Cold-War relic of an archipelago where Washington still rules like it’s puppeteering a junta in 1960s Latin America. In televised debate after insipid televised debate, Takaichi, Koizumi (a boy-faced dreamboat who comes across more as an underwear model than a politician), Ishiba, the digital transformation minister (yes, there is such a thing) and covid vaccine fanatic, Kono Taro, Chief Cabinet Secretary Hayashi Yoshimasa, the former Economic Security Minister Kobayashi Takayuki, the former Health, Labour and Welfare Minister Kato Katsunobu, the former foreign affairs minister and longtime slippery back-room dealmaker, Motegi Toshimitsu, and even current foreign affairs minister and shameless tribute-bearer to Washington, Kamikawa Yoko, all studiously avoid any discussion of Japan’s foreign military rule. Ishiba, to his credit, wants at least joint management of American bases in Okinawa. But this is in furtherance of enhancing the U.S.-Japan alliance, not getting free of it.

Journalists ask the candidates about their plans to raise taxes, about support for Israel and Ukraine, about policy prescriptions for reinvigorating the depopulated Japanese provinces, and about whether spouses should legally be able to have different last names. But to the best of my knowledge not a single LDP candidate for prime minister has offered a plan to gain independence from Washington as we enter the ninth decade of the postwar era. No LDP candidate has even admitted that Japan is under the dominion of the United States; the assumption is that Japan will go on being Washington’s fifth wheel. There’s a huge elephant in the room at every LDP nine-way discussion, this shameful dependence on an erstwhile enemy, and nobody is breathing a syllable about it, except to wish that it long continue.

Well, not exactly nobody. The former Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry Edano Yukio, who is calling to reevaluate the U.S. military’s footprint in Okinawa, and his fellow CDP candidates had the intestinal fortitude to call a Washington spade a spade. But not a soul in the LDP even glances in the big, lumbering elephant’s direction. Japanese politicians have died on the hill of American base relocation before, after all. So it’s transparent who works for whom here. One would think, watching the LDP prime minister candidates conduct themselves, that Japan were a free and sovereign country, able to make policy pronouncements without interference from foreign governments. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The elephant in the room just sits there while everyone pretends not to see it.

A big elephant. And a white one. Washington’s gift of security guarantees to Japan are increasingly seen to come with a heavy price tag. Washington leverages its position in Japan to angle for war with China over Taiwan and the Philippines. Japan’s territorial integrity is insulted daily, and Washington does nothing to help. The presence of American military advisors and CIA agents in Ukraine—and, now, almost certainly also in the Kursk area of Russia—translates, if anyone in Nagatacho cared to put a fine point on it, into war between Moscow and Japan’s only ally. Is Japan ready for a nuclear exchange with Russia? Japanese citizens abducted by and taken to North Korea decades ago continue to languish in captivity there because Tokyo’s slavish pro-Washington “conservatives” let neocons use the abduction issue to ratchet up tensions with Pyongyang. What Washington has brought postwar Japan besides inordinate dependence and, soon, another giant war, is entirely unclear.

And people know it. Fake Washington-imposed democracy is unraveling because the people of Japan are starting to get wise to the postwar game. Politicians and average citizens called for Ambassador Emanuel to leave Japan last month after his insulting refusal to attend a ceremony in Nagasaki commemorating the people his government incinerated in 1945. People who before had no interest in politics turn out to protest the injection of experimental Covid vaccines into Japanese citizens at the behest of big pharmaceutical companies. They do so in droves. A Diet politician named Haraguchi Kazuhiro, like Edano a member of the opposition CDP, became a leader in the Japanese sovereignty movement vis-à-vis transnational Big Pharma after he developed cancer during that human-subject experimentation. Another Japanese politician, Sanseito party member Matsuda Manabu, speaks forcefully about the extraction of Japanese citizens’ wealth to overseas companies. Fukada Moe, a financial analyst and author, is sounding the alarm about LDP politicians’ conniving to transfer semiconductor technology, and control of Japanese telecom giant NTT and its assets, to foreign investors. In 2023, a family- and society-destroying LGBT bill was rammed through the legislature by Kishida, who was acting at Emanuel’s behest. 

Meanwhile, in 2022, Kishida announced that he would be increasing Japan’s defense budget to 2 percent of GDP. This was part of Kishida’s quest to be Washington’s full-fledged “global partner,” their NATO affiliate in the western Pacific. Ishiba Shigeru is pushing for an Asian NATO, too. The LDP simply cannot worship Western power slavishly enough. War is coming to Japan, the social fabric is fraying, and the true nature of political rule is becoming painfully obvious.

The wholesale betrayal of the Japanese people to benefit foreigners and above all Washington imperialists has been the work of the LDP, Washington’s stand-in in the Far East. The white elephant in the room, the one casting a huge but unremarked shadow across fake Japanese democracy, has done nothing for Japanese citizens—except the LDP pols whose careers are built on the structural, systematic selling-out of their countrymen to Washington.

There’s an election coming up, sure. But what’s really on the ballot seems to be, not the nine candidates who are trying to replace Kishida Fumio as prime minister, but Washington’s fake postwar democracy itself.