Tokyo Gov. Yuriko Koike faces a crucial test this year when her honeymoon with voters ends and she is expected to produce concrete policy results instead of just reviewing and challenging the job of her predecessors and the bureaucracy. Her political style of grabbing popular attention and support by making an enemy out of the establishment forces — in her case the Liberal Democratic Party in the metropolitan assembly — could backfire if a standoff with the assembly stymies her running of the metropolitan government.
Koike has hogged the media spotlight since the former veteran Lower House member of the LDP ran for governor last August, necessitated by the resignation of her scandal-tainted predecessor Yoichi Masuzoe, over objections of the local LDP members in the assembly, and went on to defeat the LDP-backed candidate in a landslide. She has so far maintained strong popular support by tackling issues that garnered public attention — environmental/food safety concerns over transfer of the Tsukiji wholesale market to a new site in Toyosu, and reviewing some of the venues for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics amid soaring construction costs.
Riding on her election victory, Koike put on hold the Tsukiji market's move to the Toyosu site — where a Tokyo Gas plant formerly stood and high concentrations of toxic chemicals had been found — that was to take place in November, citing the pending completion of an underground water survey. The subsequent revelation that metropolitan government bureaucrats had defied the original, expert-based plan to build the Toyosu market on layers of clean soil to shield the facility from the effects of toxic substances — instead creating underground structures — pushed back the prospect of the relocation even further.