Shintaro Ishihara (30 September 1932-1 February 2022) was Governor of Tokyo from 23 April 1999 to 31 October 2012, succeeding Yukio Aoshima and preceding Naoki Inose.
Biography[]
Shintaro Ishihara was born in Kobe, Japan on 30 September 1932, and he worked as a filmmaker during his youth before entering politics with the LDP in 1968. He served in the House of Councillors from 1968 to 1972, served as Director General of the Environment Agency from 1976 to 1977, and as Transport Minister from 1987 to 1988. He was a staunch anti-communist, and he became a highly visible and popular leader of the LDP during the 1980s. Ishihara gave financial and political support to Aum Shinrikyo until the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway, after which Ishihara dropped out of national politics, left the LDP, and ended his 25-year career in Japanese politics. However, he ran for Governor of Tokyo in 1999, supporting cuts in public spending, imposing a new tax on banks' gross profits, imposing a new hotel tax based on occupancy, imposing a cap and trade energy tax, opening casinos in the Odaiba district, and culled the 37,000 crows that populated Tokyo. He won the electon, and he was re-elected in 2003 with 70.2% of the vote, in 2007 with 50.52% of the vote, and in 2011 with 43.4%. Ishihara resigned in 2012 in order to focus on national politics, founding the Sunrise Party and then the Japan Restoration Party; in 2014, he left the JRP and formed the Party for Japanese Kokoro. Ishihara became one of Japan's most prominent far-right politicians and was compared to Jean-Marie Le Pen; he called for sanctions against North Korea, criticized Japan for its non-assertive foreign policy, claimed that Koreans and other foreigners living in Japan would likely cause trouble if Japan was struck by a natural disaster, claimed that the Chinese invented the idea "that the Japanese made a holocaust", denied that the Rape of Nanking happened, claimed that the Japanese occupation of Korea was justified, and claimed that Japan ought to have nuclear weapons. He was defeated for re-election to the House of Representatives in 2014, but his sons Nobuteru Ishihara and Hirotaka Ishihara remained active in politics. He died of pancreatic cancer in 2022 at the age of 89.