The Liberal Democratic Party on November 9, 2026 reprimanded four members, including former Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, for abstaining on a sales tax cut bill in the lower house, a punishment that a former party official says sits badly against the reasons the four gave for leaving.
The penalty is a 戒告 (kaikoku), a formal reprimand that ranks second-lightest among the eight disciplinary steps in the party rules. It is the first such action against a sitting or former party president and prime minister.
Ishiba told reporters he was not intimidated. "Do you think I could do this job if I were afraid of punishment?" he said, the Asahi Shimbun reported.
“Do you think I could do this job if I were afraid of punishment?”Shigeru Ishiba, former prime minister
He defended the tax as a hard-won institution. "How much effort people at the time put in, again and again, to introduce the consumption tax," he said. "Even if it was unpopular, even if approval ratings were low, doing what the country needed was the LDP's tradition."
The other three gave their own reasons for leaving the chamber. Yuko Obuchi, a former economy, trade and industry minister, said the tax was "a system our LDP predecessors worked hard to build to respond to a low birthrate and aging society."
Hajime Funada, a former director general of the Economic Planning Agency, said inflation was still lively and that cutting the tax would not be expected to move prices. Yoshihisa Furukawa, a former justice minister, said the funding to cover the cut had not been demonstrated.
Akira Kume, 72, a former secretary general of the LDP, questioned the party's response. "The reasons the reprimanded members gave for leaving sound far more like the correct argument, and like the standpoint of the people," he told J-CAST News.
Upper house vote looms
The bill is due to enter deliberation in the upper house plenary session on the 11th. Doubts persist inside the party over how much a tax cut would do against rising prices.
Some in the party warn that a reprimand, the second-lightest penalty available, may not hold the upper house in line. "A rebellion could break out in the upper house vote as well," one voice said, according to J-CAST News.
Kume said the leadership holds a lever over upper house members, who face an election in two years. "The executive has the threat of withholding party endorsement," he said.
A handful of rebels could make any compromise with the opposition a close-run thing. Kume sees the decisive figure as Junichi Ishii, who was removed as upper house secretary general. "How Ishii moves" will shape the outcome, he said.
A supermarket owner's warning
Hiromichi Akiba, who runs the Akidai supermarket chain in Tokyo, appeared as a witness before the lower house finance committee on October 27. On cutting the consumption tax on food from 8% to 1%, he said the joy of a 7-point drop "probably won't last a month."
Kume is watching that remark closely. He said the test is whether the tax cut Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi made her cherished goal delivers a felt easing of high prices.
If the cut falls flat, he said, it could hit Takaichi's approval ratings, which had been stuck at a high plateau.