Former Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara said Wednesday he will launch a new party with at least with 21 other Diet members at the end of July.
At a news conference, the 81-year-old co-leader of Nippon Ishin no Kai (Japan Restoration Party) did not elaborate on what the new party's policy platform might look like. But it is expected to be more right-leaning and nationalistic than the ruling Liberal Democratic Party led by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
Aside from Ishihara, the 22 founding members of the new party include former Suginami Ward chief Hiroshi Yamada, who has denied that the Japanese authorities forced any Asian women to work as "comfort women" in a wartime brothel system, and former education minister Nariaki Nakayama, who has claimed that the 1937 Nanking Massacre by the Imperial Japanese Army never happened.