Fumio Kishida

• 1. Introduction

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  Fumio Kishida stood at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park on the 19th of May 2023, alongside leaders of the world's most powerful democracies, in the city where members of his own family had died in the atomic bombing. He had grown up hearing those stories. Decades later, he brought the G7 summit home to Hiroshima, with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy attending as Russia's war ground on in Europe. How does a politician shaped by that kind of inheritance navigate one of the most turbulent periods in postwar Japanese history? What kind of leader chooses to eat fish sashimi in front of cameras to counter a diplomatic crisis, or quietly lobbies for a comedy duo to front a United Nations campaign? Kishida served as Japan's prime minister from October 2021 until October 2024, and his tenure raises questions about what it takes to govern a country at the intersection of nuclear memory, economic stagnation, and a rapidly reshaping Asia.

• 2. Roots and Formation

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  Kishida was born in Shibuya, Tokyo, on the 29th of July 1957, into a family that had represented Hiroshima in national politics for generations. His grandfather Masaki and father Fumitake both sat in the House of Representatives, and his father also served as a government official in the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. The family returned to Hiroshima every summer, and it was in those visits that Kishida heard firsthand accounts from atomic bomb survivors. The weight of those stories would follow him into diplomacy.

  His father's posting to the United States took the young Kishida to New York, where he attended P.S. 020 John Bowne elementary school in Flushing, Queens, and later P.S. 013 Clement C. Moore elementary school in Elmhurst. That early exposure to life abroad shaped a politician who would later stake much of his foreign policy on international alliance-building. Back in Japan, he graduated from Kaisei Academy, where he played baseball, a sport whose team he remained loyal to in the form of the Hiroshima Toyo Carp throughout his life.

  Kishida applied repeatedly to the University of Tokyo without success, eventually studying law at Waseda University and graduating in 1982. His time at Waseda put him alongside future politician Takeshi Iwaya. After graduation he worked at what was then the Long-Term Credit Bank of Japan before moving into politics as a secretary to his father. He won his first seat in the House of Representatives in the 1993 general election, representing Hiroshima 1st, a seat he would hold for more than three decades.

• 3. The Long Climb

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  In November 2000, Kishida found himself at a crossroads when Kōchikai Chairman Koichi Kato and Taku Yamasaki of the Kinmirai Seiji Kenkyūkai attempted to bring down the unpopular cabinet of Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori through a no-confidence motion. Kishida signed the petition backing Kato and stayed away during the vote. When the Kato Rebellion failed, he pivoted and joined the anti-Kato Horiuchi faction, a choice that illustrated the calculating pragmatism that would define his career.

  By 2001 he had secured a position as Vice Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology in the first Koizumi Cabinet. In 2007, under both the Abe and Fukuda cabinets, he served as Minister of Okinawa Affairs. He was close to Makoto Koga, the long-serving leader of the Kōchikai faction, one of the oldest groupings within the Liberal Democratic Party, and in October 2012, when Koga announced his retirement, Kishida assumed control of the faction.

  That same year brought a larger prize. Following the LDP's victory in the 2012 general election, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe named Kishida foreign minister on the 26th of December 2012. He would hold the post for five years, becoming the longest-serving foreign minister in postwar history, surpassing even Abe's own father, Shintaro Abe. In 2016 he helped arrange U.S. President Barack Obama's historic visit to Hiroshima. A more unlikely moment came in 2017, when Kishida appeared alongside the comedian Piko Taro to promote a United Nations program, drawing widespread attention.

• 4. Reaching the Top

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  Kishida had been positioned as a future prime minister for years, but the path proved difficult. In 2018, he considered challenging Abe for the party leadership but was persuaded to stand aside, with Abe reportedly hinting he would back Kishida as a successor. By mid-2020, senior LDP lawmakers had shifted toward Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, and Kishida entered the 2020 LDP presidential election knowing the ground had moved against him. He lost to Suga and was not offered a seat in the Suga cabinet, though his Kōchikai faction did obtain two positions.

  When Suga's approval ratings collapsed, at one point falling below 30%, and a new wave of COVID-19 infections battered public confidence, Suga announced on the 3rd of September 2021 that he would resign. Kishida and Taro Kono of the Shikōkai faction were the leading candidates. Throughout the campaign Kono was favored, backed by both Suga and others. On the 29th of September 2021, Kishida defeated Kono in a runoff, receiving 257 votes, 60.19% of the total, drawn from 249 parliamentary members and eight rank-and-file members.

  The National Diet confirmed him as prime minister four days later, on the 4th of October 2021. His first cabinet included 21 members, 13 of them joining for the first time. He was the first LDP prime minister of Kōchikai origin in nearly three decades, a line traceable back to Kiichi Miyazawa, his distant relative, who had resigned in 1993.

• 5. New Capitalism and Economic Bets

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  From his first day in office, Kishida framed his economic program around a phrase he called the "new model of capitalism." In a parliamentary session on the 20th of February 2022 he argued that capitalism could not survive unless it served all stakeholders, not a privileged few. His administration pursued redistributive policies aimed at raising wages and expanding the middle class, a direct challenge to the neoliberal trajectory that had shaped Japanese economic policy for decades.

  The results were measurable. Japan experienced its highest wage growth in 30 years during his tenure, driven by record increases achieved through annual wage negotiations. The government also set a minimum wage target of around 1,500 yen per hour by the mid-2030s, later adjusted by Kishida himself to target that figure by 2030. In April 2023, he appointed Kazuo Ueda as Governor of the Bank of Japan, who indicated he would continue the ultra-easy monetary policy introduced by his predecessor Haruhiko Kuroda.

  Child welfare became a separate pillar. Kishida established the Children and Families Agency on the 1st of April 2023, consolidating responsibilities for nursery access, child allowances, child poverty, abuse, suicide prevention, cyberbullying, and disability support that had previously been spread across multiple agencies. On the 1st of June, the government set aside 3.5 trillion yen annually for child care. Japan's child poverty rate fell to 11.5% by 2022, and UNICEF ranked Japan eighth among 39 OECD countries in tackling child poverty in 2023. Still, critics, including The Guardian's Justin McCurry, questioned whether the measures were sufficient to reverse the country's declining birth rate.

• 6. Crises and Controversies

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  On the 8th of July 2022, the assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe by Tetsuya Yamagami exposed a tangle of connections between the Liberal Democratic Party and the Unification Church. Yamagami's motivation was his belief that the church had financially ruined his mother, and media scrutiny revealed that many LDP figures, including Abe himself and his brother Nobuo Kishi, had ties to the organization. Kishida reshuffled his cabinet on the 10th of August 2022, removing Nobuo Kishi from the defense ministry role, among others.

  In December of the same year, news leaked of a separate slush fund scandal involving ministers and senior party leaders from the Abe faction, including Yasutoshi Nishimura and Koichi Hagiuda. The Abe faction was believed to have concealed over 500 million yen over five years. Kishida sacked Nishimura and Hirokazu Matsuno along with a group of other faction members. He pledged to "work like a ball of fire" to restore public trust, then announced his own resignation as head of Kōchikai, citing the need for separation while serving as premier. The scandal deepened when it emerged that Kishida's own faction had failed to declare 30 million yen in fundraising over three years, though he attributed this to clerical errors.

  On the 15th of April 2023, a man threw a cylindrical explosive device at Kishida in Wakayama just before he was due to give a campaign speech. Kishida was evacuated unharmed. The attacker, Ryuji Kimura, a 24-year-old from Hyogo Prefecture, was arrested at the scene. Kishida continued campaigning elsewhere in the city the same day, saying that elections were the bedrock of democracy and that such violence was extremely unforgivable. Kimura was eventually sentenced to ten years' imprisonment on the 19th of February 2025.

• 7. Japan's Place in the World

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  In December 2022, Kishida instructed the cabinet to raise national security-related spending to 2% of Japan's GDP, increasing the defence budget from 5.4 trillion yen in 2022 to a planned 8.9 trillion yen by 2027, up 65%. Total spending between 2023 and 2027 was projected at around 43 trillion yen. His national security advisor described Japan as being in its most severe security environment since World War II.

  On Ukraine, Kishida was the first Asian leader to impose sanctions on Russia and Belarus following the invasion that began on the 24th of February 2022. In March 2022, he opened Japan to Ukrainian refugees. He later told reporters that Japan would provide roughly 5.5 billion dollars in aid to Ukraine. When other G7 leaders had already visited Kyiv and pressure mounted on Kishida, he made the trip on the 21st of March 2023, meeting President Zelenskyy and visiting Bucha, where he said he was "outraged by the cruelty."

  Relations with South Korea, long frozen over disputes rooted in Japan's imperial occupation, began to thaw. A reciprocal summit with President Yoon Suk-yeol on the 7th of May 2023 was the first leader-level exchange between Japan and South Korea in 12 years. At the Camp David summit on the 18th of August 2023, Kishida, Yoon, and President Biden announced the Camp David Principles, a trilateral framework for countering the influence of China, North Korea, and Russia, including intelligence sharing and annual military drills. Biden praised both leaders for what he called their "political courage... to work together."

  The August 2023 release of treated radioactive water from the Fukushima nuclear plant into the Pacific generated a sharp international response, particularly from China, which banned all Japanese fish exports. IAEA Secretary-General Rafael Grossi had confirmed in July 2023 that tritium levels in the stored water were vastly below safety standards, and a second statement in August reiterated that the water was not toxic. Kishida, along with three cabinet ministers, publicly ate fish sashimi from Fukushima on the 30th of August 2023, calling it "safe and delicious."

• 8. End of an Era

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  By late 2023, Kishida's approval ratings had entered freefall. A Jiji Press survey in early November recorded his cabinet's approval at 21.3%, and by December it had dropped to 17.1%. A Mainichi Shimbun poll in mid-February 2024 measured it at 14%, barely above the lowest modern recorded rating, set by Taro Aso just before the landslide opposition victory in 2009. Only 1% of respondents said they highly approved of his response to the slush fund scandal.

  In the 2024 Japan by-elections, the LDP lost all three seats that had previously been held by LDP members or LDP-affiliated independents. Kishida denied he would resign following those results. Then on the 14th of August 2024, he announced he would not seek re-election as LDP president in September, which meant leaving the premiership. He framed the decision as a way to give the party an open contest and to show voters the LDP was changing. In the subsequent leadership race, he initially backed Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi, then in the second round threw his support behind Shigeru Ishiba, who defeated Sanae Takaichi to become the next party leader and prime minister.

  Kishida was succeeded by Ishiba on the 1st of October 2024. He retained his House of Representatives seat for Hiroshima 1st, a district he had first won in 1993, and on the 12th of June 2025, he received the Silver YouTube Creator Awards plaque for surpassing 100,000 subscribers, celebrating by recording an unboxing video of the award.