The results of the Osaka gubernatorial and mayoral elections on Sunday may suggest that local voters are still not happy with the status quo of Kansai's largest prefecture and city and are seeking reforms. The landslide wins by the incumbent governor and mayoral candidate backed by the Osaka Ishin no Kai group testify that its founder, Toru Hashimoto, who still maintains he will retire as a politician when his term as mayor ends next month, remains immensely popular. Still, members of the group should realize they need to cooperate — and not repeat their confrontation — with other political forces if they want to pursue their agenda, including reviving Hashimoto's once-rejected pet project of reorganizing Osaka's administrative structure.

The re-election of Hashimoto's key ally, Ichiro Matsui, as governor of Osaka and the victory of former Lower House member Hirofumi Yoshimura — his hand-picked successor as Osaka mayor — comes six months after the plan to break up the city of Osaka into special districts and reorganize the division of labor with Osaka Prefecture was rejected in a referendum by local voters. The victory of Matsui and Yoshimura by large margins over candidates fielded by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's Liberal Democratic Party — with the unusual support of local chapters of the opposition Democratic Party of Japan and Japanese Communist Party — may build momentum for the Osaka Ishin group to revive the reorganization initiative, on which opposition narrowly exceeded support in the May referendum.

But it would be premature to take the outcome of Sunday's elections as outright support for Osaka's reorganization, which Hashimoto tried to sell as the key to eliminating the waste and redundancies of the dual administrative structure of the city and the prefecture, thereby helping reverse the longtime decline in Osaka's fortunes. Voters who supported the Osaka Ishin candidates may see in the group's agenda a hope for change, but the promised administrative reforms do not automatically ensure economic revival.