Sitting in his ramshackle Tokyo office filled with the stench of cigarette smoke and the leftover decor of the Chinese restaurant it was before, Taisuke Ono is the unlikely face of a populist wave that has upended Japanese politics.
The 47-year-old former Accenture consultant lost out in Tokyo’s gubernatorial race last year but has made a stunning comeback with the success of Nippon Ishin no Kai, or Japan Innovation party. In last week’s general election, the Osaka-based regional party shattered all expectations to become the country’s third-largest political force.
With a near quadrupling of its representation to 41 seats in the Diet’s powerful lower house, the once fringe party can provide Japan’s ruling bloc with the necessary votes if the government decides to push ahead with a revision to Japan’s pacifist constitution.
“This is merely the first step for us” to become a national party, said Ono, who won one of Ishin’s first two seats in the capital, Tokyo.
“We need to produce the kind of results we delivered in Osaka,” he added, citing the need for constitutional amendment and regulatory reform to revitalise the stagnant economy.
Conservatives have long sought to revise Japan’s war-renouncing constitution to make explicit the legality of the country’s armed forces. But an amendment requires significant political capital and public momentum, which made it impossible even for Shinzo Abe, the former prime minister, to achieve his life-long ambition.
On the economic front, Ishin wants to address what it said was the ruling Liberal Democratic party’s failure to deliver on promises of radical structural reform to boost growth and escape decades of deflation.
Ishin was founded about a decade ago as a regional organisation led by Toru Hashimoto, a charismatic and sharp-tongued former governor of Osaka and the closest thing Japan has ever had to a Donald Trump-style populist.
The right-leaning party is widely backed in the country’s second-largest city for its success in privatising the local subway system and for populist policies such as free education and pay cuts for parliamentarians.
Inheriting Hashimoto’s playbook is Hirofumi Yoshimura, Ishin’s 46-year-old deputy head who became a celebrity for his high-profile media appearances during the Covid-19 crisis as Osaka governor.
“Mr Yoshimura’s popularity was a significant factor in why we were able to become a third force,” said Tsukasa Abe, a 39-year-old Ishin member who was elected for the first time in Tokyo.
Beyond its newly accumulated parliamentary clout, analysts said the electoral success of Ishin puts greater policy pressure on the new administration of Fumio Kishida.
Ishin supports the LDP’s push to increase Japan’s role in national security and defence spending to address the threat from China, as well as the need for constitutional revision.
But the party has sharply criticised the prime minister’s vision for new capitalism to achieve wealth redistribution and “warm-hearted reform”. It argues that “reform with pain” is necessary to open up tightly regulated markets for growth.
“I think the fact that you had a party with a new way of thinking increase the number of seats shows that there is a desire for change and a more radical solution among the electorate,” said Richard Kaye, a portfolio manager at French asset manager Comgest and a veteran investor in Japanese equities.
“It is a welcome development because it pushes the country further towards reform and deregulation.”
Apart from crushing the LDP in Osaka, Ishin collected votes outside of its stronghold in western Japan by leveraging public disillusionment with the ruling party. It also exploited scepticism towards the main opposition camp’s botched election strategy to ally with the Japanese Communist party despite their ideological differences.
Still, Mieko Nakabayashi, a professor at Waseda University, said Ishin faced an uphill battle to become a potent force in national politics. Ishin, she said, had to work out how it could retain its distinct identity as an opposition force while working with the LDP and its coalition partner Komeito on policy initiatives.
“The LDP will likely weigh its options and make the Komeito and Ishin compete against each other,” Nakabayashi said. “The challenge is how much Ishin can demonstrate its presence in national politics.”
One crucial area of co-operation between all three parties is constitutional reform, which requires a two-thirds majority of parliament followed by a majority vote in a national referendum. While the LDP and Komeito retain a comfortable majority by winning 293 out of the 465-seat lower house, they still need Ishin to reach the two-thirds threshold.
But with an upper house election looming next summer, analysts question whether Kishida is willing to take the huge political risk of pushing ahead with a contentious agenda that could antagonise both the public and Komeito, a pacifist, Buddhist party.
Ishin also only raised the issue of constitutional amendment during the election in the context of legalising free education rather than to promote a change in the war-renouncing Article 9.
Party members admit that Ishin risks losing its identity if it works too closely with the LDP, and repeating its volatile history of gaining and losing seats.
“The common concern for the third force is the loss of momentum following a boom,” Ono said. “Our main DNA is reform, so we need to push ahead without compromising.”