I wrote the first version of this post in July 2025, just after the ruling coalition lost its majority in the upper house. Japanese politics at that moment looked unstable on the surface: a weakened prime minister, a fragmented opposition and a new populist party surging. My argument was that the real problem was the opposite of instability. It was a system very good at staying in place.

A lot has happened since. Shigeru Ishiba announced his resignation in September 2025. Sanae Takaichi won the LDP leadership and became Japan’s first female prime minister in October. Komeito left the coalition and the LDP formed a new partnership with Nippon Ishin no Kai. Then in February 2026 Takaichi called a snap election and the LDP won 316 of 465 lower house seats, the largest single-party result of the postwar era.

That is a lot of motion. The question I still find most useful is whether the structural problems underneath have moved at all.

What people meant by “Knessetization”

After the July 2025 upper house election, some commentators compared Japan’s Diet to Israel’s Knesset, warning of a slide into fragmented, unstable coalition politics. I thought the comparison missed the point then, and the 2026 landslide makes it look even less apt.

Israel’s instability comes from intense competition: many parties, high engagement and frequent collapses of government. Japan’s difficulty was never too many competing voices. It was a single dominant party that rarely faced the prospect of losing power and a public that had largely stopped expecting politics to change anything. When the LDP lost ground in 2024 and 2025, the result was not a new politics but a pause while the party worked out which senior figure would take over.

How the 1955 system was built

The LDP was formed in 1955 through a merger of conservative parties, largely to hold off the Japan Socialist Party. For nearly four decades it delivered spectacular results. It presided over the postwar recovery and the high-growth era, and became the natural party of government.

The engine was often called the Iron Triangle: the LDP, the elite ministries and big business. Politicians and companies agreed on export-led growth, and bureaucrats designed and ran the industrial policy. Senior officials often moved into politics or into jobs at the companies they had regulated, a practice known as amakudari (“descent from heaven”). The result was continuity.

Real competition took place inside the LDP, between its factions (habatsu), rather than against the opposition. Factions were patronage networks built around senior politicians. They controlled campaign money, endorsements and, above all, cabinet and party posts. An ambitious young politician advanced through years of loyalty to a faction boss, not through public support or policy ideas. The party’s hold on rural districts, which were overrepresented, rested on public works spending in exchange for reliable votes.

That arrangement was built for stability and catch-up growth. It was not built for reform.

Why the system could not adapt after the bubble

When the asset bubble burst in the early 1990s, the weakness showed. The Lost Decades brought a stock market collapse, a banking crisis and years of deflation. Governments of the period mostly responded with stimulus packages that added to public debt while protecting existing interests.

The opposition could not take advantage. The Socialists were tied to an outdated platform, and smaller parties were too narrow to build a national coalition. Without power they also could not deliver spending to local districts, which made it hard to build grassroots strength.

The Democratic Party of Japan finally won a landslide in 2009. Its government, which lasted until 2012, was hampered by inexperience, internal rivalry and difficult relations with the bureaucracy, and its handling of the 2011 Tohoku disaster damaged it further. That experience left a lasting belief among many voters that the LDP might be complacent but at least knew how to govern. The LDP’s longevity owes as much to that memory as to enthusiasm for the party.

What the Abe years showed

Shinzo Abe’s second premiership (2012 to 2020) was the most serious recent attempt at a national direction. “Abenomics” combined aggressive monetary easing, fiscal stimulus and a promised third arrow of structural reform. Abe also promoted the “Free and Open Indo-Pacific,” a regional strategy later taken up by the United States, Australia and India and closely tied to the Quad, and he reinterpreted the constitution to allow limited collective self-defense.

The first two arrows had visible effects. The yen weakened, corporate profits rose and the stock market recovered. The third arrow largely missed. Real wages stayed flat for most households. “Womenomics” raised women’s labor force participation, but many of the new jobs were part-time or low-paid, and Japan’s ranking in global gender gap indices stayed near the bottom of rich countries.

The pattern is revealing. Abe’s agenda succeeded where it worked with the existing power structure, in diplomacy, security and monetary policy. It stalled where it challenged entrenched domestic interests in the labor market, corporate governance and the bureaucracy.

Culture as a brake

Culture reinforces the structure. The value placed on wa (harmony) and the slow consensus-building of nemawashi help avoid open conflict, but they also tend to dilute decisions until nobody powerful is offended. The saying that the nail that sticks up gets hammered down is not a law of nature, yet it describes a real reluctance to reward people who break ranks.

When I talk with young professionals and students in Tokyo, many describe politics as a distant drama performed by an older cast whose concerns are not theirs. Whether that amounts to apathy is worth testing carefully: turnout differs a great deal by election, age group and period. But the sense of distance is real, and it keeps some of the country’s most capable people away from public life.

Factions: dissolved and returning

The 2023 to 2024 slush fund scandal, in which factions failed to report political funds, led most LDP factions to announce their dissolution. Only Taro Aso’s group continued formally. For a while it looked like a genuine break.

By 2026 the picture had shifted. After the February landslide, the Aso group grew, and faction-like “policy groups” built around members of the dissolved factions became active again, partly in preparation for the next leadership race. The Japan Times asked in March 2026 whether the factions were staging a comeback. The Tokyo Review’s history of LDP factions explains why they are so hard to remove: they perform real functions in funding, training and promotion that the party has never replaced.

The problems that have not moved

Beneath the change at the top, the structural pressures are the same ones that existed in 2025, and several are sharper.

  • Demographics: births fell to about 671,000 in 2025 and the total fertility rate to a record low of 1.14. Roughly 29% of the population is 65 or older, and the population has been shrinking for well over a decade.
  • Labor market rigidity: seniority pay and lifetime employment still limit mobility for many workers, and a large non-regular workforce earns less with weaker protection.
  • Gender inequality: Japan’s gender wage gap remains among the widest in the OECD, and a long-hours culture still penalizes women who have children.
  • Education: schooling still rewards exam performance more than independent problem-solving.

None of these respond to a larger majority by themselves. They respond to sustained, unpopular reform.

Scapegoating is the easy option

As these pressures grow, political debate has increasingly turned toward foreign residents. Sanseito’s “Japanese First” platform won 14 upper house seats in July 2025 and 15 lower house seats in February 2026, and immigration has moved up the agenda of the main parties too. Foreign residents are about 3% of the population. National Police Agency figures show that criminal arrests of foreign nationals (excluding permanent residents) remain well below their mid-2000s peak even though the foreign population has roughly doubled since then. The story of a foreign crime wave does not match the record.

The political function of the story is clearer than its evidence. It is easier to talk about foreigners than to reform pensions, liberalize the labor market or change how large companies treat their staff. I explore this further in Economic frustration is not an explanation for blaming foreigners.

A better frame: the harbinger state

The political scientist Phillip Lipscy describes Japan as a “harbinger state”: a country that meets problems such as population aging and slow growth before other wealthy democracies do. He is careful to note that going first does not guarantee finding the best answers. It often means a slow process of trial and error.

I find that more useful than the language of decline. Japan has repeatedly shown it can change quickly when it decides it must, in the Meiji era and after 1945. The opportunity now is to treat aging, labor shortages and the adoption of new technology as problems Japan can solve first and well, including for everyone else who will face them later.

The Takaichi government now has the largest majority any single party has held in the postwar period. That removes the usual excuse that coalition arithmetic makes reform impossible. Whether the majority is spent on the structural problems above, or on keeping the party’s internal balance intact, is the test I will be watching.

Further reading: Economic frustration is not an explanation for blaming foreigners · immigration costs and Japan’s labor policy · a politician’s music taste is not a policy position · zombie companies and stifled entrepreneurship in Japan