Japanese Politics Updates – September 13, 2026

On Deck in Katsuyama: Koja Takes Okinawa, the Yen Holds the 153s, and the Cabinet Turns Over

Good day from Katsuyama. The front that sat on the archipelago for ten days has almost lifted, and I am still below decks. Fukuoka, Chiba, and Akita took the worst of it while Okinawa caught a typhoon that U-turned and hit twice. Another storm is due Friday into Saturday, aimed at the south rather than Tokyo, right through Silver Week.

Sunday Okinawa voted. Genta Koja, 42, took the prefecture for the conservative camp for the first time in twelve years. Denny Tamaki wanted a third term but did not get it. Turnout was just over 61 percent. The margin was not close. That result is the peg the rest of the fortnight hangs on.

The sitting cabinet is meant to clear the food-tax draft at the start of the week. PM Takaichi names the new faces on Wednesday, they sit for the official photograph in tails on Thursday, and the sub-cabinet lands Friday. Silver Week then runs Saturday through Wednesday. She leaves for the UN General Assembly on Monday, a national holiday, and is back before the holidays end. She wants a little face time with Donald Trump before President Xi arrives in Washington for a state visit later in the week. An extraordinary Diet follows on October 2 or 5, and it will have to carry the negotiations on the food-tax cut.

A Win in Naha

Koja is a former Naha vice mayor. He had the LDP, Ishin, the DPP, Sanseito, Komeito’s Okinawa chapter, and the Conservative Party of Japan behind him. Tamaki, 66, the son of an American serviceman, used to be LDP, sat two terms in the Lower House, went home, and built All Okinawa. The LDP already holds all four Okinawa Lower House seats and had been without the governorship since 2014. Koja will be the first governor born after the islands reverted to Japan in 1972.

Okinawa is still the poorest of the forty-seven prefectures. It still hosts something close to 90 percent of the U.S. forces in Japan. Futenma-to-Henoko has been in limbo for a dozen years. The landfill is built. The alignment is not. Pocketbook issues have pushed the bases down the list in the local polling. Nagatachō treated the race as a national test anyway. The working read from the boat on Sunday morning was that the energy behind Koja would be too much to reverse. That read held.

If the new governor works with the center, Tokyo’s line is that money and projects follow. The Marine move from Futenma to Henoko can now leave the courts and go onto a calendar. There may also be a cabinet-level thank-you for the LDP hand that orchestrated the win. We will know more once the new faces are named.

The Sequence, Now on a Clock

PM Takaichi spent the week in the Kantei. She is not an overseas gallivanter in the Kishida mold. She sat with LDP tax commission chief Itsunori Onodera and Finance Minister Satsuki Katayama on the draft that takes food from 8 percent to 1 percent. The Prime Minister spent a long session with Chief Cabinet Secretary Minoru Kihara, who is likely to stay. She spent two consecutive days with Taro Aso. The tension between them is palpable. It is also workable. The list, by Sunday, had hardened.

Friday night she hosted a cabinet dinner at the Kantei. Sixteen of the eighteen ministers came. Two were on the road. Of those eighteen chairs, five or so hold. Finance, foreign affairs, defense, and the chief cabinet secretary usually stay. Shinjiro Koizumi at Defense, Toshimitsu Motegi at Foreign, Katayama at Finance, Kihara at the desk. The rest turn over. She also saw Takayuki Kobayashi, the policy chief and a potent name for 2027. The working read is that he keeps the party job and does not get a ministry. Koichi Hagiuda stays as deputy secretary-general under Shunichi Suzuki, Aso’s brother-in-law, to keep an eye on that corner of the building.

There is a queue. Seventeen LDP members have been elected eight times and two of them are still waiting. Twenty-two have been elected seven times and five of those are still waiting. After six elections a Lower House member is no longer a junior and traditionally deserves a chair. The queue is longer than the seats. PM Takaichi said last week that she will pick people aligned with what she is trying to do, not by sex and not by the old pecking order. That tension is very real. The reshuffle is also a set of handcuffs. Cabinet ministers cannot easily campaign against the prime minister who sits them there. She runs again for LDP president this time next year.

Yoshimasa Hayashi would like to vacate Internal Affairs so he can speak more freely. Taro Kono was given nothing last autumn, so he can talk, yet he has not spent the year tearing at her. Kimi Onoda is not in the next cabinet. Bunshun has the second-office receipts from the 2022 Upper House race, and the visa file has her name on it. The policy on the visas is not going with her. It will stay.

Ishin has been a good soldier for a year without a written alliance. The price named last summer was a 10 percent cut in Lower House seats and a cabinet chair. PM Takaichi could not muster the cut through the last session. The working read from the boat is that Ishin does not get one of the eighteen seats this time. A sub-cabinet post is the other half of the bargain still on the table. Combined with Ishin she can push the Lower House. She cannot, on present numbers, push the Upper House the same way.

The Opposition, Still in Pieces

The Centrist Reform Alliance came apart a week ago. Yoshihiko Noda’s idea was to fold the Constitutional Democratic Party together with Komeito and call the result a centrist bloc. It held in the Lower House but never in the Upper House. Although they passed the sixty-four bills they put up, it cost political capital. The people who left their home parties to join it are parachuting out. Some will drift back to Komeito or the CDP. Some will sit as independents. Others will walk to Yuichiro Tamaki’s Democratic Party for the People.

That is now the largest opposition force in the Diet, still under fifty members, and Tamaki has a fresh three-year term. He is already picking the fight he wants, the food tax. A unified opposition would have given PM Takaichi a real problem. At this point, she does not have one. The LDP has more than 350 seats in the Lower House. The CDP has fewer than forty. That tail is not going to wag this dog.

Eight to One, and a ¥10 Trillion Hole

The draft takes food from 8 percent to 1 percent for two years from April. The campaign line was zero. The 1 percent is the version that cash registers can actually do. Subsidies are supposed to cover the rest for the lower rungs, so the government can call it close enough. Two arguments will walk into the October Diet with it. What happens when the rate snaps back to 8 percent after two years. And where the money comes from. It is ¥10 trillion over two years. She has said it will not be deficit bonds. The ideas floating around are ripe for dissection. Tamaki is already sharpening his claws.

The Yen at 153

A week ago Friday one dollar bought 156.24 yen. This Friday it closed near 153.5, after a print through 153 earlier in the week. That is a different kind of move from the joint intervention last month, when Japan and the United States spent about ¥15 trillion, roughly $94 billion, to pull the rate from 164 toward the mid-150s. That one walked back to 160 within a few weeks. This one does not feel like intervention. It looks like Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent saying out loud that he was driving the bus.

Ueda is independent of the prime minister on paper, and Japan is independent of the United States on paper. In a room with Bessent those sentences get thinner. Richard Katz put a useful range on the board last week, 140 to 160 through year-end. Households have been living in the 160s for most of this year, which is why the food-tax cut is on the table. A stronger yen helps the people who buy energy and food in dollars. It is not a thrill for the exporters. PM Takaichi’s preference is a stronger yen. It is not 120. Keidanren would not sit still for that.

GDP was revised up to 1.4 percent annualized. That is not a boom. Food inflation is still there. The utility subsidy has expired. Consumption is the constraint, and has been for more than a decade. One trial balloon this week was the Government Pension Investment Fund, some ¥318 trillion, half of it overseas by the cap. The suggestion was to buy fewer foreign stocks and more Japanese ones. Two problems. The overseas slice is there because the return is better. And the fund sits with the health ministry, not finance. The Bank of Japan meets on the 18th and 19th, as Silver Week opens. A 25-basis-point rise is still the number people are writing down.

Beijing, Seoul, and a Destroyer that Once Capsized

A second parliamentary delegation left for Beijing on Sunday. Masahiro Komura is leading eight members of the Japan-China Friendship league, ruling and opposition together, for three days. It is the first visit of that kind since PM Takaichi said a fight over Taiwan would be an existential threat to Japan. China still wants the comment withdrawn. The last trip opened few doors. This one is meant to grease the skids, not to settle anything. Beijing is still running the war-hawk line. The comment is not going to be withdrawn.

Shigeru Ishiba was in South Korea talking up a tighter Japan–South Korea–United States track. He is a former prime minister, and he still carries throw-weight. The LDP has spent a year cleaning up after his Upper House loss.

North Korea fired a volley of short-range ballistic missiles on Saturday, the day after Freedom Edge closed. Nothing entered Japan’s exclusive economic zone. Six days earlier Kim Jong-un commissioned a 5,000-ton destroyer at Wonsan with his daughter on the red carpet. It is the second of two. The first rolled off the dock and capsized. He talked in the speech about a nuclear-capable cruise-missile ship and a nuclear navy. The IAEA told its board last week that a new two-story building is a second uranium-enrichment hall, with centrifuges that have been running for six months. Xi Jinping has told Washington that if it really wants a meeting with Kim, China can help, provided the objective is clear. His stop in Washington will put that on the table too. A Trump–Kim meeting is still in discussion.

Historical Frame

On September 13, 1871, Japan and Qing China signed the Sino-Japanese Friendship and Trade Treaty in Tianjin, the first modern treaty between them. It put diplomats and consuls in each other’s capitals and tried to write equality into the relationship. The Komura delegation landing in Beijing on the same date 155 years later is a much thinner instrument. Dialogue is the most anyone is claiming for it.

Sunday’s winner in Naha will be the first Okinawa governor born after May 15, 1972, the day the prefecture reverted to Japan and the bases did not leave. The argument those bases still make is now his to manage, and Tokyo’s to collect.

Q&A Highlights

• After the Koja win, how fast can Futenma-to-Henoko actually move, and what does Tokyo owe Okinawa for it?
• Can an 8-to-1 food-tax cut that snaps back in two years, and leaves a ¥10 trillion hole, pass the October Diet?
• Does the yen hold the 153s through the Bank of Japan this week, or travel the 140–160 band Katz has on the board?
• Does PM Takaichi get the Trump meeting in New York before Xi lands in Washington?
• Does the Komura delegation thaw anything in Beijing, or does the withdrawal demand stay where it is?

In Closing

The week runs personnel, then New York, then a two-day working week after Silver Week. October’s Diet will ask whether a cut that leaves a ¥10 trillion hole can pass a chamber the coalition does not control, and whether a new cabinet can sell more spending on the revenue already on the books. The opposition that was supposed to make that fight hard is still in pieces. Ishin is still standing there with its hat in its hands.

Okinawa broke the other way on Sunday. The LDP won. The yen’s second jump in two weeks did in the market what ¥15 trillion only rented last month. Whether 153 holds through the 18th is the market question. Whether PM Takaichi uses the Koja win to name a cabinet she actually runs is the political one. The rain is supposed to stay offshore until Friday.

Thank you to everyone who joined and sent questions. We will be back next Sunday morning, September 20, 2026, at 8:20 a.m. JST.

— Timothy Langley