Former Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba has called today's short-video-driven politics "very frightening," in an interview in the November issue of Bungeishunju. Ishiba, who has often quoted Ishibashi Tanzan (1884-1973) in Diet speeches, spoke about the journalist and Tosho Keizai Shinposha president who became prime minister for just 65 days.
Ishiba said he was born during the Ishibashi cabinet, the third-shortest-lived government in Japan's postwar record. He arrived on the day Nobusuke Kishi delivered the policy speech in place of Tanzan, who had fallen ill.
The historian Masayasu Hosaka has described Tanzan as having "the shortest tenure and the greatest achievements," Ishiba said. Tanzan could not build a long government like Shigeru Yoshida's, but he held more of the oppositional spirit than the bureaucrat-politicians Yoshida and Hayato Ikeda, who succeeded Tanzan, Ishiba said.
"Tanzan's greatest charm is that he did not flatter," Ishiba said. During the Manchurian Incident, when other newspapers held back from criticizing the military, Tanzan kept arguing in the Tosho Keizai Shinpo that "the line of national defense is sufficient at the Sea of Japan." After the war he sharply criticized GHQ for ordering the Japanese government to end compensation payments to munitions and private companies. He flattered neither the military, nor those in power, nor the United States.
Ishiba said Tanzan's greatest strength was that he did not flatter even the public. Tanzan, who argued in editorials for abandoning Manchuria, kept warning against the public's fervor. People say the government deceived them or the media inflamed them, but it was the public that climbed aboard and grew feverish, and Tanzan suggested the public bore responsibility too. "I truly think I want to be like that," Ishiba said.
As prime minister, Ishiba quoted Tanzan in his policy speeches because Tanzan was his ideal and because that spirit was what politics lacked. Tanzan did not simply set out ideals or descend into spiritualism. His "small-Japanism" criticized territorial expansion backed by military force and argued that Japan should give up its colonies and grow as a trading nation.
A warning from inside the party
Ishiba's warning about short-video politics comes from a former leader of the Liberal Democratic Party, whose own campaigns have leaned on social media. He did not say in the interview which videos or which politicians he had in mind, and the published text does not elaborate on the remark.