How the soaring cost of rice left a nation without a leaderBy Lisa Visentin
September 9, 2025 — 5.00am
Singapore: Japan will soon have its third leader within little more than a year, an event triggered by the early exit of Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba.
Tokyo’s revolving door of leaders is hardly an aberration in its post-World War II history – there were six prime ministers between 2006 and 2012 before Shinzo Abe governed for an unprecedented stretch of nearly nine years until 2020.
Foreign Minister Penny Wong and Defence Minister Richard Marles met with Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba in Tokyo on Friday. Ishiba resigned on Sunday. Credit: APAustralia, too, is no stranger to tumultuous government, having cycled through six prime ministers between 2010 and 2018. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is the first leader to win back-to-back elections in two decades.
But Japan’s leadership vacuum adds to a picture of chaotic governance in the pillar of East Asian democracy at a time when the international system is being roiled by an unpredictable White House and China’s bid to assert its authority as a global superpower.
Just three days ago, Foreign Minister Penny Wong and Defence Minister Richard Marles met with Ishiba and their ministerial counterparts in Tokyo to discuss defence and regional security.
The timing was significant, occurring just days after China projected its alternative vision of a non-democratic world order in a massive military parade attended by Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. Australia sent only a low-level diplomatic presence.
The meeting provoked the predictable backlash from Beijing, via an editorial in state media newspaper China Daily, which said Australia and Japan’s strengthened security co-operation was “stirring up tensions, making the region more insecure and unstable”.
Ishiba’s resignation, announced on Sunday, will shuffle in a new cabinet and possibly fresh faces in the foreign and defence ministries after the ruling Liberal Democratic Party goes through a weeks-long process to choose a new leader.
“It’s not good for Japanese foreign policy,” says Tomohiko Satake, an associate professor at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo, referring to the leadership rotations.
“In order to maintain a stable foreign security posture, we need strong leadership. Ishiba has been pretty much domestic-focused rather than foreign-policy oriented, although he knows military things very well.”
“It’s not good for Japanese foreign policy,” says Tomohiko Satake, an associate professor at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo, referring to the leadership rotations.
“In order to maintain a stable foreign security posture, we need strong leadership. Ishiba has been pretty much domestic-focused rather than foreign-policy oriented, although he knows military things very well.”
It also poses another setback for the beleaguered Quad security dialogue between the US, Australia, Japan and India, which was created to counter China’s growing influence in the Indo-Pacific region. A meeting between the four countries’ leaders, loosely flagged to be held in Delhi this year – but already under question due to the Trump administration’s 50 per cent tariff on Indian goods – is now increasingly unlikely given the uncertainty over who will take the reins in Tokyo.
“Japan is not going to play any role in driving the Quad apart, but if it doesn’t have stable leadership, it won’t be able to play much of a role in trying to bring it together,” says Jeffrey Hall, a lecturer at Japan’s Kanda University of International Studies.
“Abe was on very good terms with Modi. There is no other Japanese politician who has that relationship with India.”
More broadly, on the international circuit, Ishiba’s successor “might be seen as just another unpopular Japanese prime minister who’s probably going to be going away very soon. So why even bother caring about what exactly they think?” Hall says.
Ishiba was forced to fall on his sword after the LDP, which has governed Japan for almost all the post-World War II period, suffered heavy electoral losses on his watch. At a snap general election after he secured the leadership in October, the LDP was plunged into minority government when it lost control of the lower house, and in July it suffered a historic defeat in the upper house elections.
Domestically, Ishiba had been trying to reverse the country’s economic malaise, which was brought into sharp relief by a near-90 per cent surge in rice prices over 2024 levels. The government’s perceived mishandling of the issue became a proxy for its economic management and laid the groundwork for its crushing upper house defeat.
Japan is not in the throes of a “crisis of democracy”, says Kawashima Shin, a professor of international relations at the University of Tokyo, who adds that the country’s entrenched bureaucracy helps ensure stability through the rolling leadership changes.
But society-wide distrust in politics and especially in the LDP, which has struggled to recover from a slush fund scandal, will see the party limp along in minority government and with more leadership rotation likely, he says.
Meanwhile, China has escalated its military activity around Japan’s territorial waters over the last year and the direction of its China policy will hinge on whether the LDP’s conservative flank wins back the leadership.
LDP veteran Sanae Takaichi, who lost to Ishiba during the last leadership race and is again a front runner, is renowned for her hawkish views on China.
After visiting Taiwan, which China claims as its territory, this year, she called for Japan, Australia, Europe and Taiwan to form a “quasi-security alliance” to protect each other’s interests. The idea will sink like lead in Canberra, which steps carefully around the Taiwan issue.
Her main challenger is expected to be Shinjiro Koizumi, the 44-year-old scion of a former prime minister who has cultivated an image as a progressive reformer but lacks experience in foreign policy and is expected to stick with Japan’s current China policy settings.
For Chinese officials watching from Beijing, where party leadership is cast in generations, not months, the outcome of Japan’s “here today, gone tomorrow” politics probably counts more as intrigue than substance.
Source:
https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/world/asia...908-p5mt91.html 
Sep 7 2025, 03:16 PM, updated 3 months ago
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