Sapporo –

In an Upper House election where many candidates and parties are striving to win over voters in the major cities, 77-year-old Hokkaido native Muneo Suzuki, running as a Liberal Democratic Party proportional candidate, says his campaign strategy is decidedly different.

“I traveled to Yonaguni, in Okinawa, the westernmost part of Japan. The suffering, sadness and hardship of the remote islands, as well as the harshness of living on the border of Japan requires political action,” Suzuki told a crowd in Sapporo last Saturday.

On July 3, the kickoff day for the Upper House election, Suzuki cheered other LDP candidates in Sapporo, flew to Nosappu Cape adjacent to the Northern Territories — the four islands of Kunashiri, Etorofu, Habomai, and Shikotan off the coast of Hokkaido that Russia seized from Japan at the end of World War II — and flew down to Okinawa Prefecture.

The next day, he began his campaign in Yonaguni and other islands next to Taiwan, visited Naha, and then traveled to Kobe and Osaka for stump speeches.

Suzuki is running in the nationwide proportional representation system, where people vote for a party and the parties distribute seats won among their candidates based on the number of votes it received.

In Yonaguni, he told his Sapporo audience, everyone asked him why he chose to come, as the island has only 1,390 votes.

“I’ve been involved in political activities in such places (as Yonaguni) for 43 years, and my mindset is that one vote in Yonaguni is worth 500 votes in Tokyo,” he said.

While other candidates under the proportional representation system prioritize major cities and social media, Suzuki has long pursued grassroots strategies. In the 2019 Upper House election, he won over 220,000 votes as a proportional representative for Nippon Ishin no Kai.

In the same Sapporo speech, Suzuki also touted Hokkaido’s indigenous Ainu population as a key local cultural reason why the prefecture is attracting more international attention.

“As an indigenous minority group, the Ainu people have long valued and protected the environment, something the world is paying attention to,” he said.

Suzuki’s personality and past actions make him a divisive political figure.

During his long career, he became known as an expert on Hokkaido and Okinawa, as well as foreign affairs and defense issues. He served in parliamentary vice minister posts for defense and for foreign affairs, and was state minister for the Hokkaido and Okinawa Development Agency.

Suzuki was also known as a strong advocate of Japan’s relationship with Russia, and worked to promote visits by the former residents of the Northern Territories to their ancestral graves, as well as people-to-people exchanges between Russians and Japanese.

He was also often at the center of controversy. In 2002, following a bribery scandal, Suzuki quit the LDP. He was then forced to resign from parliament in 2010 after a final conviction for bribery and other offenses.

Suzuki went to prison but was released on parole in December 2011 and lost the right to run or vote in an election until 2017. He did not return to parliament, however, until the 2019 Upper House election, as a proportional representative for Nippon Ishin no Kai, winning more votes than any of the party’s other proportional candidates.

However, Suzuki got into trouble in October 2023, when he traveled to Moscow in the hope of realizing direct visits by the aging former islanders to the Northern Territories, which had been suspended after Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

The visit drew criticism from Nippon Ishin, and Suzuki resigned from the party that same month.

The upcoming Upper House race marks a homecoming of sorts for Suzuki, who returns to the LDP after 23 years, in the latest twist in a political career that began with winning a Hokkaido Lower House district seat in 1983.

Suzuki said he decided to return to the LDP because it was the party that helped rebuild Japan in the post-World War II period, and that, as a conservative politician supporting those efforts, he wanted to help the party regain public trust.

But in Hokkaido, his supporters remain loyal less for his foreign policy expertise or relationship with Russia and more for his past success in getting central government money for building Hokkaido roads, bridges, dams and other projects.

In his stump speech last Saturday in Sapporo, Suzuki touched on this by saying that he would push for more money for further developing Hokkaido’s expressways.

“Suzuki is one of the last traditional pork barrel politicians. In Hokkaido, there are areas that lag behind urban areas in infrastructure development. He has met the expectations of local voters by obtaining large central government budgets for such projects,” said Kentaro Yamamoto, a political scientist at Kokugakuin University.

“Although LDP politicians from local areas are more or less pork barrel types, it’s rare to find one who has been as thorough and effective in working with voters as Suzuki," he added. "Voters may also be influenced by their own bias towards the difficult path in life Suzuki has walked."

But as Sunday's election draws near, it remains unclear whether past loyalties among voters in Hokkaido, Okinawa, or elsewhere will be enough to secure him a seat as a party proportional candidate.

He admitted the LDP was in a tough position and that his chances of winning were said to be borderline, but that, regardless of what happened, this was his last election.

If Suzuki loses and does retire, it would be the end of an era, but not the end of the Suzuki family in Hokkaido and Japanese politics. His 39-year-old daughter Takako, a LDP Lower House member representing a Hokkaido district that includes Kushiro and Nemuro, is continuing her father’s legacy.