Fukuoka's mayoral election, announced on November 1 and to be voted on November 15, has drawn a record 13 candidates, all of them newcomers. Who finishes first is one question. Whether anyone wins at all is another.
Under the Public Offices Election Act, a mayoral election goes to a rerun if no candidate takes at least a quarter of the valid votes. With 13 candidates splitting the field, a rerun is considered likely, according to reports.
The race opened after incumbent Mayor Soichiro Takashima, in office for four consecutive terms, said in August he would not seek a fifth. He has not named a successor, though people close to him are said to be working in several camps.
Distrust of the established parties has grown over a "political and money" scandal in the Fukuoka Prefectural Assembly, where large sums are suspected of changing hands over the posts of speaker and vice speaker. The Liberal Democratic Party, Nippon Ishin no Kai, the Constitutional Democratic Party, the Democratic Party for the People and Komeito have all declined to field or endorse their own candidates.
An LDP survey in late October put Shuji Inatomi, a four-term former lower house member from the Constitutional Democratic Party, at the front of the 13. He was followed by Keiko Yoshitomi, an ophthalmologist endorsed by the Sanseito party, Takashi Cho, a four-term Fukuoka city assembly member, Kentaro Mori, an IT engineer for the Japan Conservative Party who ran in February's lower house election and last year's upper house election, and Hisaya Watanabe, a former official at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.
Support is thin even at the top. Just over 20 percent of those surveyed said they would vote for Inatomi, and the rest of the field drew support in the teens or lower.
“Together with the five in front, former city assembly members Yu Shinmura and Hideki Abe will come back with organizational backing, so it is getting more and more crowded. All we hear from the camps likely to finish near the top is whether they have the stamina and the money to run one more election.”a Fukuoka city assembly member identified as A, told AERA DIGITAL
Yokohama's mayoral election in October, with seven candidates, was also talked about as a possible rerun, but no rerun was needed.
Shinji Ishimaru's name has come up in Fukuoka political circles as a candidate some camps would watch warily in a rerun, according to AERA DIGITAL. Ishimaru, the former mayor of Akitakata in Hiroshima Prefecture, drew national attention when he ran for Tokyo governor in 2024.
The election is the second recent shock to Fukuoka politics. The prefectural assembly speaker at the center of the funding scandal has resigned his seat, and Takashima announced he would stand down.