Kirk here with an election update: Fumio Kishida will be Japan’s next prime minister.

Here are some notes about how RKK reported the Kumamoto side of the election today. The LDP party members in Kumamoto voted as follows:

Kishida: 6109 Kono: 6012 Takaichi: 2783 Noda: 743

In addition to party members, the votes of Diet politicians accounted for about half of the electorate in the national vote. Of six LDP politicians from Kumamoto three supported Kishida.

As I’m not a big fan of right-wing politicians, I was glad that Takaichi (the person on the left in the picture) didn’t have a lot of support in Kumamoto. Here’s a blurb about Takaichi from Japan News:

“Takaichi, a former internal affairs and communications minister, is known as one of the most conservative LDP members, calling for highly conservative policies, such as maintaining male-only Imperial succession, visits to Yasukuni Shrine, and Japan’s possession of precision-guided missiles and armed drones. Yasukuni Shrine, which enshrines Class-A World War II criminals along with the war dead, is considered a symbol of Japan’s past militarism, particularly in China and Korea.”

https://the-japan-news.com/news/article/0007776111

In case there’s any doubt about whether her patronage of Yasukuni has meaningful policy implications, check out this sentence from an Asahi article:

“Her security policies include developing a preemptive strike capability to counter threats from China and North Korea.”

https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14448535

The one Diet member from Kumamoto to support Takaichi was KIHARA Minoru. Here’s part of a statement that appeared in the Washington Post that he signed:

“The ianfu (comfort women) who were embedded with the Japanese army were not, as is commonly reported, ‘sex slaves.’ They were working under a system of licensed prostitution that was commonplace around the world at the time.”

https://www.japan-press.co.jp/2007/2533/history2.html

I won’t take the time to explain how this misrepresents what has been documented. I’ll just say that there’s lots of evidence to the contrary.

The support for Takaichi was quite high among LDP diet members (sorry, I forgot the exact numbers). I’m glad that the extreme right doesn’t seem to be quite as popular here in Kumamoto.