49 Days of “Clinging On” and a Dysfunctional Kantei: Prime Minister Ishiba, a De Facto “Recall”

On September 7, 2025, a prime minister’s career came to an end in Japan’s political arena. At a press conference beginning at 6:00 p.m., Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba formally announced his resignation. The denouement was the inevitable result of calls within the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) to move up the party leadership race after the governing coalition (LDP–Komeito) suffered a historic defeat in the July House of Councillors election. Yet the path to the September 7 announcement revealed more than mere “responsibility for electoral defeat”: it exposed a deviation from the LDP’s traditional “political culture” and a serious paralysis of governance at the end of the administration.

In the LDP’s 70-year history, a major defeat in a national election has “normally” meant the prime minister’s immediate resignation. Takeo Miki after the LDP first lost its single-party majority in 1976; Kiichi Miyazawa after the 1993 lower-house defeat that ended 38 years of LDP rule; and Taro Aso after the 2009 historic power shift—all “defeated generals” who swiftly stepped down. Ishiba was different. Despite suffering a “loss” when the then-governing parties fell short of a majority in the October 2024 lower-house election, and then another heavy defeat in the July 20, 2025 upper-house contest—a “two-game losing streak”—he remained in office for an unusually long 49 days before announcing his resignation.

Behind this unprecedented “staying power” lay Ishiba’s singular political position. Long seen as a “party-internal opposition figure” and non-mainstream, he did not necessarily accept the “common sense” or “political culture” tacitly shared by the party mainstream as rules to be obeyed. He tried to maintain his government in defiance of intra-party pressure, but that attempt was crushed by the LDP’s organizational dynamics. He finally lifted his heavy feet only when signatures from Diet members and prefectural party chapters calling for an accelerated leadership race appeared set to form a majority—effectively a “recall” of the party president. Rather than deciding to step down of his own accord, he was forced by the party to abandon any bid to continue. His “persistence” was his last power struggle with the mainstream—and it ended in complete defeat.

More serious still, the final act of this resignation drama symbolized a late-stage “Kantei malfunction.” As one political journalist noted, the surprise was not the resignation itself but its “timing and method.” The announcement was suddenly scheduled for an unusual slot—Sunday night. And the “Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary for the House of Representatives,” who should have supported the prime minister at such a crucial juncture, reportedly received no prior notice and could not attend. The fact that the process for a decision of national importance—the prime minister’s resignation—was not even shared with the core Kantei team showed that the Ishiba administration had failed to maintain control not only within the party but also over its own staff. Ishiba’s departure was not a clean exit of a leader accepting defeat; it was an “incident” in which a premier who defied party tradition was pushed out by intra-party forces amid a paralysis of governance.

A Twisted Diet and Policy Gridlock: Setbacks on “Wage Increases” and “Social Security”

At the September 7 press conference, Ishiba cited two official reasons: first, that responsibility for the election results lay with him as party president; second, that “with a chapter closed in negotiations over U.S. tariff measures, now is the appropriate timing,” invoking diplomatic achievements to justify the moment. Yet the “U.S. tariff” rationale was likely a pretext to divert attention from the real cause of a government collapsing less than a year after taking office. The core crisis was not a particular diplomatic negotiation but the domestic “cost-of-living crunch” and the political paralysis of a “minority government.”

The administration’s failure was structurally preordained the moment the LDP–Komeito coalition lost its lower-house majority in October 2024. In Japan’s system, a “twisted Diet” in which the ruling side lacks a majority in both houses is a fatal drag on governance. The Ishiba government fundamentally lacked the thrust to pass key bills. His remark at the resignation presser—“To responsibly hand down social security systems such as medical care, nursing care, and pensions to the next era, we must pursue cross-party discussions, including on the balance between benefits and burdens”—was both an ideal and, read inversely, a searing admission that the ruling side could no longer decide anything on its own.

This stalemate appeared most clearly in two areas. First, “social security reform.” Under the banner of sustainability and in line with business demands, the government sought to raise the cap on high-cost medical expense benefits from August 2025, effectively increasing out-of-pocket costs. It directly hit households struggling with inflation, provoked fierce backlash from patient groups, and had to be withdrawn early. A “new regional healthcare plan” that would have reduced infectious-disease beds—arguably at odds with lessons from COVID—also stalled amid opposition criticism and public skepticism.

Second, “wage increases,” the administration’s proclaimed top priority, never materialized. To the end, Ishiba said those supporting daily life—caregivers, welfare and medical workers—“should be paid more.” But by his January 2025 policy speech, the wage target—“nationwide average ¥1,500 sometime in the 2020s”—had effectively been pushed off. Bolder measures deemed essential for wage growth outpacing inflation—like tapping major firms’ retained earnings to support SMEs—never came; the rhetoric remained a hollow “support for productivity improvement.” Unable to present concrete solutions to ease people’s hardship, the government rapidly lost support. Though Ishiba pointed to diplomacy (U.S. tariffs) as a reason for stepping down, in substance it was a “policy defeat” under a twisted Diet that blocked progress on core domestic issues—directly triggering July’s historic upper-house loss and the government’s collapse.

The Turmoil of the “Post-Ishiba” Era: The LDP’s Choice of Sanae Takaichi as a Political “Strong Medicine”

Ishiba’s resignation created a power vacuum and ignited a fierce internal struggle over the LDP’s future “course.” The party leadership election announced in September became a clash of two starkly different futures—an attempted “refounding” of the party. The protagonists were Shinjiro Koizumi (44), riding broad popularity and campaigning on “cost-of-living relief,” and Sanae Takaichi (64), a conservative stalwart positioning herself as the party’s ideological pillar.

The race laid bare how to assess the Ishiba administration’s failure and what would revive the party. Koizumi offered a direct answer to the “cost-of-living crisis,” the very problem that felled the Ishiba government. Pledging to “listen again to the people and confront their anxieties,” he put anti-inflation relief first: promptly scrapping the provisional gasoline tax, revising income tax to reflect rising prices and wages—concrete measures tied to household defense, privileging pragmatism over ideology.

Takaichi’s stance was the foil. Closely aligned ideologically with the late former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and known for a hard line on China, she represented the LDP’s “conservative standard-bearers.” While she included policies like refundable tax credits, her core appeal lay in a statecraft shaped by her tenure as Minister for Economic Security and a firm re-anchoring of conservative ideology.

Why did the LDP ultimately choose Takaichi’s ideological line over Koizumi’s pragmatic one? The answer lies in the party’s profound sense of crisis and “desperation.” After back-to-back defeats in the 2024 lower-house and 2025 upper-house elections—and rocked by a “political funds scandal”—the party’s base teetered. As a U.S. think-tank scholar noted, the LDP had lost under the “moderate” Ishiba. That fact planted a conviction among members that a “moderate/centrist” line could not restore the party. In this desperate context, they rejected Koizumi’s focus on household anxiety and bet on Takaichi’s “rightward turn” as a “potent remedy” to rally the traditional conservative base and ideologically rebuild the party.

The October 4, 2025 leadership election reflected this dynamic: Takaichi led the first ballot with 31.07% and then defeated Koizumi in the runoff with 54.25%, becoming the LDP’s first female president in its 70-year history. The Ishiba government’s collapse thus marked the failure of an “moderate/centrist” course and propelled a high-risk “sharp turn to the right” as the party’s bid for revival.

Collapse of a 26-Year Coalition and a New Era for Japan: The World’s Gaze

The political convulsions from Ishiba’s resignation to Takaichi’s election did not end with a mere change of prime minister. They triggered a tectonic shock that shattered the very foundation of Japan’s political stability. The price of the LDP’s “rightward swerve” was immediate and dramatic: the LDP–Komeito coalition, which had underpinned governance since 1999, collapsed within days of Takaichi’s selection.

The direct cause was failed talks between the new LDP leader and Komeito. Citing the LDP leadership’s “inadequate” response to the political funds scandal, Komeito chose to exit the coalition. Ostensibly about scandal management, the rupture’s roots lay deeper—in the irreconcilable ideological rift between Takaichi’s hawkish conservatism and Komeito’s platform centered on peace and welfare.

Dissolution of the 26-year coalition produced an abnormal political situation: with Komeito’s departure, the LDP lost its majority in both houses. Yet because the opposition could not unite behind a single candidate, Sanae Takaichi was elected Japan’s 104th prime minister in the Diet vote on October 21, 2025. It marked the start of governance by a “minority government” lacking firm parliamentary footing—signaling, at home and abroad, that the political stability Japan had maintained since the 1990s (after years of coalition experimentation) had evaporated.

The international reaction has mixed “uncertainty” and “wariness.” Bloomberg’s first alert on Ishiba’s sub–one-year resignation warned that “Japanese politics becomes opaque”—a forecast realized in the worst way by the coalition’s collapse. Asked about Ishiba’s exit, U.S. President Trump curtly replied, “I don’t know,” a seemingly indifferent posture that nonetheless portends risks of new economic frictions or security strains with an unstable Japanese government.

Neighbors voiced more immediate concern. In China, state-run Xinhua flashed the news; on Weibo, “Ishiba resignation” topped search trends. The Party-affiliated Global Times judged that Japan had “entered an era of turmoil,” linking the rise of an exclusionary party in the upper-house election with the ascent of a hawk like Takaichi, and signaling unease over Japan’s potential drift toward greater political and military assertiveness.

South Korea expressed the gravest worries. Major outlets reported that Ishiba’s exit “likely pushes Japan–ROK relations into a tougher phase.” A Korean government official assessed that the next (Takaichi) administration “may lean more conservative,” calling for “careful monitoring” on the premise of renewed cooling in bilateral ties.

One political analyst described Ishiba’s resignation as “the beginning of the end.” Ironically, that phrase proved an accurate prophecy: the “end” of the Ishiba administration also signaled the “end” of Japan’s political stability since 1999—and the “beginning” of a turbulent era under Prime Minister Takaichi.