Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba faces mounting pressure to resign after the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and its coalition partner Komeito lost their majority in the July upper house election. That marked the second major loss by an Ishiba-led LDP government after he dissolved parliament and lost a majority in the lower house only weeks after taking the reins on 1 October 2024.
Yet Ishiba defiantly refuses to resign despite his weak position with a minority government in both houses, breaking with the norm he once advocated. His ability to cling to power illustrates Japan’s current political stalemate — a fragile equilibrium where no one is strong enough to govern effectively, all parties are too weak to change the status quo and policy innovation is in gridlock.
On one side of this fragile equilibrium, Ishiba faces a double squeeze that threatens his hold on power. From within the LDP, the party’s conservative-nationalist wing seeks to replace him with one of their own. They have persistently criticised Ishiba on core conservative touchstones including his relatively accommodating policy toward China, his position on historical issues, his sympathy for same-sex marriage, his openness to separate surnames for married couples and his support for a female emperor.
Simultaneously, as Yasuo Takao points out in one of our lead articles this week, the far-right populist party Sanseito has ‘surge[d] from the fringe to mainstream, securing 14 seats’ in the upper house largely at the LDP’s expense. Sanseito achieved this by tapping into the economic grievances of Japan’s ‘employment ice age’ generation through xenophobic ‘Japanese First’ messaging. As Naoto Higuchi and Yoojin Koo point out, this development does not necessarily reflect support for strict anti-immigration policies, but both sources of pressure exploit anxiety about Japan’s national direction, promoting a nationalist narrative that leaves little room for Ishiba’s preference for deliberative, consensus-building governance.
On the other side of the equilibrium are counterbalancing forces that keep Ishiba’s house of cards from collapsing. The LDP’s conservative nationalists are politically weakened by their role in the Unification Church and slush fund scandals, hampering their ability to oust Ishiba, at least for now. Meanwhile, the main opposition parties — the Constitutional Democratic Party, Democratic Party for the People, and Japan Innovation Party — are divided by ideological differences and tactical disagreements, preventing them from capitalising on the LDP’s vulnerability and presenting a practical alternative government.
This fragile balance comes with governance costs, limiting Japan’s capacity to tackle pressing problems. Two critical areas, China policy and immigration, demonstrate the consequences of political paralysis.
As Shin Kawashima says in our second lead article this week, Ishiba’s relatively conciliatory approach toward China has become a political vulnerability following the LDP’s electoral setbacks. Despite maintaining continuity with his predecessor’s approach, Ishiba faces accusations from LDP conservative nationalists, Sanseito and the broader right-wing ecosystem of being too accommodating toward Beijing. His personal background — as a mentee of former prime minister Kakuei Tanaka, who normalised Japan–China relations — has made Ishiba susceptible to charges of being ‘pro-China’.
The domestic political contest prevents Ishiba from deepening engagement and threatens to undermine Japan’s pragmatic China policy of balancing dialogue with deterrence. The risk, as Kawashima concludes, is that political pressure could force a future administration toward a more hardline stance, destabilising ‘the currently constructive and relatively stable bilateral relationship’. At a time when the Trump administration’s assault on the global trade regime requires Japan–China cooperation, Ishiba finds himself caught between domestic critics demanding a tougher China stance and the practical need to maintain workable relations with Japan’s largest trading partner.
The same political pressures on Japan’s China policy also prevent decisive action on immigration — another area where nationalist rhetoric directly conflicts with economic necessity.
Immigration emerged as a potent political weapon during the July upper house election, despite Japan’s foreign resident population comprising just 3 per cent of the total. As Takao argues, Sanseito made immigration its ‘most potent rallying point’, calling for ending welfare benefits for foreigners, restricting their employment, and enforcing stricter cultural conformity. This exclusionary rhetoric resonated not because immigration levels are high, but because it offered the economically insecure ‘a clear — if misleading — explanation for their struggles’.
This anti-immigration messaging flies in the face of Japan’s demographic crisis. The population shrank by 908,574 to 120 million in 2024, with fertility at just 1.15 children per woman. Nearly one-third of the population is over 65, creating an unsustainable dependency ratio that makes foreign workers essential to fill critical labour shortages.
The contradiction extends beyond labour needs to fiscal reality. With public debt at 250 per cent of GDP and mounting pressure from an ageing society on public services and pensions, Japan needs the stable tax base that only permanent residents can provide. While tourists provide economic stimulus in Japan’s second-largest export industry, they don’t contribute the income tax revenue that Japan desperately needs.
Japan’s immigration debate is trapped in semantic evasion, with politicians refusing to use the word ‘immigration’ while maintaining the fiction of temporary ‘guest workers’. This linguistic sleight of hand reflects deeper political reluctance to acknowledge what demographic reality demands: Japan must transition from temporary labour programs to genuine permanent migration pathways. The political establishment’s refusal to engage seriously with immigration policy leaves Japan managing this transition through ad hoc responses rather than strategic planning, held back by nationalist rhetoric that ignores economic necessity.
Japan’s political paralysis over immigration and China policy will be among the key challenges discussed at the 2025 ANU Japan Update conference in Canberra and streamed online this week.