Issue:
April 2025 | Letter from Hokkaido
Mio Sugita’s possible return to parliament as a Hokkaido MP has local LDP officials worried
The announcement last month by the Liberal Democratic Party [LDP] that it was going to publicly support Mio Sugita as a proportional candidate in this July’s Upper House elections sent shockwaves through the political world, particularly in Hokkaido.
Sugita, a former Lower House member from Hyogo Prefecture, is about as right-wing as it is possible to be in the LDP. She remains deeply in sync with former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s ideology – she joined the party at his invitation – at a time when many of his former allies are speaking in more measured tones in the hope of gaining broader appeal for a party that is trying to put the Abe years behind it.
She can be particularly unapologetic and insulting. Even many LDP members prefer not to be in the same room with an MP who mocked minority groups, including the Ainu, on social media. Past senior LDP leaders were forced to issue public rebukes of her comments and behavior, which resulted in her being chastised in 2023 by two legal affairs bureaus in Sapporo and Osaka for her discriminatory remarks towards, respectively, the Ainu and ethnic Koreans.
Many thought Sugita’s political career was over when voters kicked her out of the Lower House in the October 2024 election. But for reasons known only to senior LDP leaders, she is set to return as an Upper House proportional representation candidate. The idea that Sugita could return to parliament has come as a shock to some in Hokkaido.
Hokkaido is now “CDP country”. Voters kicked out LDP Lower House representatives last year, to the shock of deeply conservative, right-wing voters in Hokkaido who, among other things, never agreed with the Japanese government’s decision to formally recognize the Ainu as an indigenous people.
But the possibility of Sugita returning to parliament has the CDP and the more moderate and progressive elements of Hokkaido society angry and asking questions. In a testy exchange between Hokkaido-based Constitutional Democratic Party member Kenji Katsube and Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba in the Upper House last month, protested Sugita’s LDP endorsement.
“This is an insult to all the people of Hokkaido who are working to pass on Ainu culture as a source of pride and as a local asset,” Katsube said.
Ishiba said the LDP would not withdraw its endorsement of Sugita. But his response indicated that he may not be a particular fan of hers , saying the verdict on the decision would be rendered at election time.
That’s true. But it obfuscates the fact that Sugita is not running as a district candidate – with the LDP consensus being that she would be easily beaten by most opposition candidates – but as a PR candidate. That means she will be chosen based on the number of votes the LDP itself receives. Her performance will, therefore, be more of a reflection of how voters feel about the party rather than about her.
That reportedly worries some LDP allies of Ishiba. The party’s powerful secretary general, Hiroshi Moriyama, is reportedly no fan of Sugita. One of Japan’s most astute politicians, Moriyama knows she is more of a liability to the party than an asset when it comes to winning proportional votes, especially from younger, non-aligned voters, and particularly in Hokkaido, where the party was never expected to do that well anyway.
In endorsing Sugita, the LDP is essentially saying that the Ainu and their supporters don’t matter when it comes to the party’s strategy to win Upper House votes. They may be right. After all, Hokkaido is just one electoral district among many. But the LDP still holds out hope that it can once again become the dominant party there.
Many in the LDP may have little or no interest in Ainu issues. But that is not the case when it comes to Hokkaido’s economic and military role in Japan-Russia relations, seafood and agricultural products for domestic consumption and export, wind energy to major urban centers on Honshu, the heavily central government-backed Rapidus 2 nm semiconductor foundry and – although it’s not polite to say it out loud – central government assistance for Hokkaido-based firms involved in bullet train construction and road maintenance.
In those cases, all politicians, regardless of party, suddenly take a great interest in Hokkaido's politics. Yet the last thing anybody in the LDP or their Hokkaido supporters want is to find themselves unable to focus on these other issues at election time because they first have to address a fellow member’s latest remarks about the Ainu.
Given the way Japan’s voting system operates, Sugita may well garner enough votes to return to parliament as a member of the Upper House. But as Moriyama, and perhaps even Ishiba, probably suspects, if she does it will be despite, not because of, the wishes of a lot of Hokkaido voters.
Eric Johnston is the Senior National Correspondent for the Japan Times. Views expressed within are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Japan Times.
