Shigeru Ishiba

Shigeru Ishiba was prime minister of Japan for a year, having spent twenty years as the Liberal Democratic Party's most persistent internal critic. He was the son of a governor of Tottori, worked at a bank, and entered the Diet at twenty-nine on his father's political inheritance. He specialised in defence, which in Japanese politics is unfashionable and detailed work, and became known for genuine expertise in it - director general of the defence agency, then the first defence minister when it became a ministry, and an advocate of a more explicit military posture, a standing status-of-forces revision with the United States, and an Asian collective security arrangement. He left the LDP once, in the 1990s, and returned. He ran for the party leadership four times and lost, each time with strong support among rank-and-file members and little among the factions, because he had criticised Abe publicly and by name over the Moritomo and Kake scandals and over constitutional interpretation. The fifth attempt, in September 2024, succeeded, largely because the party had just been damaged by an unreported-funds scandal and needed someone visibly outside it. He called a snap election almost at once and lost the LDP's lower-house majority for the first time since 2009, governed as a minority, then lost the upper house too in July 2025. He resigned that September and was succeeded by Sanae Takaichi, Japan's first woman prime minister. He is an unusual figure in Japanese politics for being a practising Christian, a minority of about one per cent of the population. He is also known for a public enthusiasm for military models and railways that his opponents used against him and his supporters found humanising. His premiership included an apology for the party's funding scandal and a stimulus package aimed at inflation, neither of which recovered the seats the snap election had cost.

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