Japanese Politics Updates – September 6, 2026

Below Decks in Katsuyama: The Alliance Comes Apart, the Yen Jumps to 156, and Okinawa Goes to the Vote

Good day from Katsuyama. It is raining miserably and I am reporting from below decks, something I have not done since winter. The John Malkovich character in Burn After Reading lived on a boat too. This is that kind of morning.

A large typhoon made a U-turn around Okinawa and is hammering the southern islands. Last week’s storm missed the waters off Tokyo and slammed the China coast instead. Anak Krakatau, the younger brother of the 1883 volcano, started erupting on Friday. Yesterday’s pink sunset looked volcanic. It was just autumn. Nagatachō has been tectonic in its own way.

On Monday, the Centrist Reform Alliance came apart. That opposition project lasted seven months. This week the current cabinet is meant to send the provisional budget forward. Next Sunday, September 13, Okinawa votes. After that comes the first cabinet reshuffle of the Takaichi government, Silver Week from the 19th to the 23rd, and the Prime Minister’s first UN General Assembly. She speaks in the late afternoon on the same day Donald Trump speaks in the morning. An extraordinary Diet follows in October, and it will have to carry the food-tax cut. The Okinawa race is still the peg the rest of the fortnight hangs on.

A Color Guard at Ichigaya

PM Takaichi stayed in town. The finance minister, Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi, and Bank of Japan Governor Kazuo Ueda were out of it. Defense Minister Shinjiro Koizumi was not. She went to the Ministry of Defense for the first full gathering of senior Self-Defense Forces officers since she took office. It was a color-guard morning. The message was concrete. The three security documents will be rewritten by year-end. AI and unmanned systems are to be embedded in the force. Treatment of the people who serve is supposed to improve, because the country is not producing more of them.

A Sasakawa Peace Foundation trial balloon about inviting foreigners into the SDF did not last the week. It had no velocity. What does have velocity is the industrial side of the same story. Motegi spent time with the Visegrád four — Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia — on supply chains, munitions, and defense production that does not run through Brussels rhetoric. Two weeks ago Koizumi was in India with a pair of F-2s. The military-industrial structure that was already growing before she took office is putting on weight.

The Sequence, Still in Flux

There are two ways to time the reshuffle. One is to move before Okinawa and put a cabinet title on one or two of the four LDP Lower House members from the prefecture. Two of those four have already held cabinet rank.

The other, and the likelier, is to let the cabinet now sitting pass the provisional budget, take the vote on the 13th, and only then change the faces. Either way the core stays. Taro Aso remains LDP vice president. His brother-in-law, Shunichi Suzuki, remains secretary-general. Finance, foreign affairs, defense, and the chief cabinet secretary usually stay with them. Of nineteen cabinet seats, five or so hold, with the rest — twelve or thirteen — turning over. For any member of the Lower House, after six elections he is no longer a junior and deserves a cabinet position. There is a backlog of people who think this is their turn, so that tension is very real.

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. PM Takaichi could not muster it through the last session, so the promise is still on the table. A 10 percent cut would cost the LDP about seventeen seats, which is why Ishin wants it and why the LDP winces. A cabinet chair, maybe two, is the other half of the bargain. It still does not solve the Upper House. Combined with Ishin she can push the Lower House. She cannot, on present numbers, push the Upper House the same way.

Who she keeps in the cabinet also sets the 2027 race. Cabinet ministers cannot easily campaign against the prime minister who sits them there. Yoshimasa Hayashi has already said he would like to vacate his post vso he can speak more freely. Taro Kono was given nothing last autumn, so he can talk, and he has. One year ago tomorrow Shigeru Ishiba resigned. It does not feel like a year.

The Opposition Comes Apart

Yoshihiko Noda’s idea was to fold the Constitutional Democratic Party together with Komeito and call the result a Centrist Reform Alliance. It held in the Lower House and never held in the Upper House, which is why the spring session was arduous. Although they passed the sixty-four bills they put up it cost political capital. On Monday the come-to-Jesus meeting failed. The Alliance is in tatters. What happens to the people who left their home parties to join it is unclear. Some will drift back. Some will sit as independents, which makes them easy pickings for Yuichiro Tamaki’s Democratic Party for the People.

That is now the largest opposition force in the Diet, still under fifty members, and as of this morning Tamaki has a fresh three-year term as its leader. A unified opposition would have given PM Takaichi a real problem. At this point, she does not have one.

Onoda, Visas, and a ¥300,000 Problem

Economic Security Minister Kimi Onoda is the face a lot of foreigners put on the tighter business-visa rules — fees up tenfold, language requirements, the obligation to hire a Japanese national when you stand up a KK or a GK. A Japan Times piece this week on qualified people leaving the country made the number look stark. Some of that is overstated. Some of it is not.

Bunshun is the other problem. The magazine says that in the 2022 Upper House race she ran a second, undeclared campaign office in Setouchi on top of the one Okayama election law allows. The fine is ¥300,000. She has called it a matter of interpretation and said she will revise the financial statements. Bunshun came back with receipts made out to the election office and testimony from people who worked there. I do not think she is in the next cabinet.

Okinawa: The Peg in the Board

Denny Tamaki, 66, wants a third term. His father was an American serviceman. He used to be LDP, sat two terms in the Lower House, went home, and built All Okinawa. Genta Koja, 42, is a former Naha vice mayor with the LDP, Ishin, the DPP, Sanseito, Komeito’s Okinawa chapter, and the Conservative Party of Japan behind him. The LDP already holds all four Okinawa Lower House seats and has been without the governorship for twelve years.

Okinawa is the poorest of the forty-seven prefectures. It also has the highest birth rate and the longest lifespan, and it hosts something close to 90 percent of the U.S. forces in Japan. Futenma-to-Henoko has been in limbo for a dozen years or more. The landfill is built. The alignment is not. Tokyo’s line is that money and projects follow a governor who will work with the center. Tamaki’s line is that the prefecture gets short shrift because it will not do the center’s bidding. Pocketbook issues have pushed the bases down the list in the local polling, and about half the electorate is still undecided. Nagatachō is treating a prefectural race as a national test anyway. The vote is Sunday the 13th. The polls open just after we come on the air.

The Yen at 156, and No Intervention This Time

Monday the dollar bought about 160.18 yen. Thursday it touched 155.3 and closed near 155.8. Friday’s close was 156.24. That is a different kind of move from the joint intervention a month ago, 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 look like intervention. It looks like the G20 meetings, and like Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent saying out loud that he was sure Japan would do the right thing and the yen would strengthen.

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. Washington wants a stronger yen and a bolder Japanese economy at the same time. Those two wishes grind. A weak yen helps the exporters and hurts everyone who buys energy and food in dollars. Households have been living in the 160s for most of this year, which is why the food-tax cut from 8 percent to 1 percent is on the table and why two-thirds of the people asked still want to know how it is paid for.

The Bank of Japan meets on the 18th and 19th, the week sandwiched between Okinawa and Silver Week. They have held in the last two, maybe three, meetings. A 25-basis-point rise is the number people are writing down. Japanese markets hate volatility more than they hate most other things. Bessent’s sentence is the one they will be parsing.

There will be no supplemental budget in the October session. She has said those no longer work. Ministries drafting the FY2027 requests have been told the old 5 percent cap is off for the seventeen priority industries on the honebuto list — AI, rare earths, semiconductors, defense, shipbuilding among them. That money does not hit the economy until April. Richard Katz published a useful dissection last week of whether spend-more-make-more closes a ¥10 trillion two-year hole. I will not pretend it is my field. It is the question the extraordinary Diet will be asked.

Orient Shield, Tomahawks, and a Tight Bind

On September 1 Moscow protested Orient Shield, the United States–Australia–Japan exercise that put some 3,700 personnel into the field, including Hokkaido, and used a U.S. Typhon mid-range launcher on Japanese soil for the first time. Typhon fires SM-6 and Tomahawk. The Russian defense minister called it absolutely unacceptable, the same phrase Tokyo used about Russian live-fire drills off the Northern Territories this summer. North Korea wagged a finger at Freedom Edge and at the latest drills and reached for the warmonger line it always reaches for.

Chinese visitor numbers are still down about half since she said a fight over Taiwan would be an existential threat to Japan. Food shipments have been leaned on. The peace constitution sits where it sat. The neighborhood does not. Unmanned systems and AI are how a country that is not producing more people tries to do more with the ones it has. They are also an export story Toyota and Sony already know how to tell.

Historical Frame

Tomorrow is a year since Shigeru Ishiba resigned and opened the five-candidate race that produced Japan’s first female prime minister. Three of those five took ministerial posts. One of them, Taro Kono, did not. The cabinet PM Takaichi names this month is also the field she is willing to freeze until the party votes again in September 2027.

On September 8, 1951, Japan signed the San Francisco Peace Treaty. Sovereignty came back. Okinawa did not, not until 1972, and the bases that arrangement left behind are still the argument inside next Sunday’s vote.

Q&A Highlights

• Will the yen hold the mid-150s, or walk back toward 160 ahead of the Bank of Japan?
• Cabinet before Okinawa or after — and does Ishin actually get a chair?
• If Koja wins, does Henoko leave limbo, and what does Tokyo owe Okinawa for it?
• What does Japan actually gain by hosting a permanent CPTPP secretariat?

In Closing

The fortnight runs Okinawa, then personnel, then New York. 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 in the book. The opposition that was supposed to make that fight hard came apart on Monday. Ishin is still standing there with its hat in its hands.

Public support has stopped falling, even if it has not recovered. The yen’s jump this week did in two days what ¥15 trillion only rented for a few weeks last month. Whether that holds through the 18th is the market question. Whether PM Takaichi uses a Koja win, if she gets one, to name a cabinet she actually runs is the political one. The rain is supposed to get harder tonight.

Thank you to everyone who joined and sent questions. We will be back next Sunday morning, September 13, 2026, at 8:20 a.m. JST.

— Timothy Langley

Langley Esquire continues to provide government relations services and independent analysis of Japanese politics, diplomacy, and economics for an international audience. Share the briefings if you find them useful.