Pyeongtaek, South Korea –

Japan's newly minted defense minister, Minoru Kihara, is already in hot water after just a month on the job.

This past weekend, Kihara was in Sasebo, Nagasaki Prefecture to deliver a stump speech for this Sunday's parliamentary by-election.

Given that he was also visiting the Sasebo-based Maritime Self-Defense Forces, Kihara wore a military-style windbreaker and ball cap while urging the audience to vote for the Liberal Democratic Party candidate, stating, “Supporting the LDP candidate will repay the efforts of the Self-Defense Forces and their families.”

This drew immediate ire from those labeling it an inappropriate attempt to leverage the SDF as a partisan political tool. Opposition parties have seized the opportunity to denounce the statement, compelling Kihara to issue a next-day retraction of his comments. The administration of Fumio Kishida has tried to distance itself from the situation, but the effect of this one statement is likely to reverberate in the political landscape over the coming weeks.

Can one sentence delivered during a stump speech actually have an impact on the overall political situation in Tokyo? After all, if this happened somewhere else in the world, the issue would probably run its course over a few news cycles until something else caught the public’s attention.

However, things like this can grow legs in the Japanese political space. All it takes is for the opposition parties to make a concerted effort to amplify the issue. They do so via news engagements and social media, but they have their greatest effect during parliamentary interpellations.

In the Japanese parliament, lawmakers can raise any issue they like during the different committee meetings. What that means is that administration officials sitting in the budget committee might answer questions from one politician about defense issues and then have to respond to criticisms from another over the scandal of the day. These televised interpellations not only yield the opposition parties an opportunity to challenge the administration, it gives them a chance to hijack public discourse on political issues.

With the extraordinary session of the parliament opening on Friday and the by-election taking place on Sunday, Kihara has inadvertently handed the opposition parties ammunition with which to attack the Kishida administration. While there may be some practical merit in debating the gravity of Kihara’s misstep, the true level of impropriety is immaterial from a political perspective: It was a mistake that can be exploited, so it will be.

The opposition parties will leverage any of three arguments in the coming weeks, both to influence the forthcoming by-election and to call for Kihara’s resignation during the extraordinary session of the parliament.

The first argument is that Kihara abused his authority as a Cabinet minister. It is easy for opponents to state that he was wrong to leverage his role as a senior government official to influence election outcomes. They could argue that this principle applies to any minister, be it defense, economy, justice or others, given that these politicians received a special appointment that comes with added salary and other benefits courtesy of the Japanese taxpayer.

The second argument is that Kihara’s behavior negatively affects civil-military relations in Japan. While sentiments toward the SDF have advanced far beyond the days of the “runaway military” and “tax thieves” labels, opponents will question the nature of ties between the ruling party and Japan’s uniformed forces. This is especially pertinent as the Kishida administration is actively seeking additional money for SDF acquisitions and sustainment. Rather than having to debate the actual merits or demerits of such budgetary decisions, the opposition now gets to shift focus to whether Kihara blurred the lines in political neutrality of the SDF.

The third argument is that Kihara’s statement demonstrates that he is not competent enough to serve as defense minister. Critics will simply assert that the defense minister should know better than to make this kind of mistake. Observers of Japanese politics should fully expect the opposition to use this as a mantra during parliamentary interpellations, arguing that Kihara should step down immediately.

How do we know that these are the arguments that will be made? Because this is reminiscent of June 2017 when then-Defense Minister Tomomi Inada told a crowd of onlookers, “On behalf of the Defense Ministry, the SDF and the LDP, and as defense minister, I ask for your support.” Like Kihara, Inada subsequently retracted the statement, but the opposition raised these same arguments. This was another blow to Inada during a string of other mistakes she had made that eventually led to her resignation.

Kihara is in a stronger position to weather this political storm than Inada was in 2017, but the Kishida administration is not. Polling numbers hit record lows for Cabinet approval across multiple outlets this week. The public continues to express its displeasure at Kishida’s perceived inability to stimulate the economy and address internal political issues. The opposition knows this and smells blood in the water, so they will try to use the Kihara incident to erode public trust further.

The Kishida administration has not helped its own cause in this issue so far. Rather than tackle it head on, they have issued statements that will neither resonate with the public nor do anything to dispel the opposition’s arguments. Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno stated that Kihara made the statement as an independent member of parliament rather than a Cabinet minister, so the Kishida administration will refrain from commenting on “a politician's activities.” Meanwhile, LDP Secretary-General Toshimitsu Motegi expressed that “Kihara has done well as defense minister in his first month,” so the party has no intention of taking further action on it.

This approach simply yields the initiative to the opposition parties and they are sure to seize it. Observers should expect opposition lawmakers to derail interpellations in challenging the Kishida administration on this matter. Further, if the opposition parties or the political tabloids are able to dredge up any evidence of similar impropriety from Kihara or other Cabinet officials, then this problem will only increase in scale and effect. With Kishida’s approval ratings already trending downward, this is another blow that he really cannot afford to take.

So, can a single statement by a Cabinet minister really disrupt the Japanese political landscape?

For better or worse, it can. The question now is how much disruption the opposition will be able to effect in the coming weeks. While it is impossible to know whether they will be successful in weakening the Kishida administration further, we can guarantee that they will try.

[bio]Michael MacArthur Bosack is the special adviser for government relations at the Yokosuka Council on Asia-Pacific Studies. He previously served in the Japanese government as a Mansfield fellow.[bio]