Yuichiro Tamaki, the leader of the Democratic Party for the People, announced on September 19 that he would go on a "digital detox until the holidays end" and disappeared from X, where he posts almost daily and calls himself a "twi-hai" — a Twitter addict. Two days later his office said where he had gone: Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, where Russia's invasion continues. He is the first sitting opposition party leader to visit since the invasion began.
The detox was not simply a break from social media. To guard against communications interception and unauthorized access, he left his usual smartphone in Japan. The lawmaker who traveled with him, Jesus Fukasaku, the party's international bureau chief, used a rental device. In Poland, a stopover, officials warned them to watch out for sabotage, according to J-CAST News. Tamaki spent 15 hours in Kyiv. Air-raid alerts sounded eight times, and he saw the funerals of two soldiers.
He gave two reasons for the trip: to show, across party lines, that Japan stands for the rule of law, and to get firsthand information about drone use at the front. Cheap drones cannot be met indefinitely with expensive interceptors, he argued, and he said Japan should put "about half" of its defense budget into drones.
A warning in Poland and a phone left behind
J-CAST News interviewed Tamaki after the trip. Asked why a self-described Twitter addict would leave his smartphone in Japan, he explained the concern about interception and hacking. He described the security measures as a precaution rather than a response to any specific incident.
Asked what left the deepest impression, he pointed to what he saw in the capital. Photographs provided by Fukasaku's office show a Russian Geran-2 attack drone displayed in the city, with "do not touch" written in Ukrainian on its wing. Others show the two men in vyshyvanka, Ukrainian national dress, standing before a wall of soldiers' portraits and flowers.
The images from the trip also include a smartphone screen displaying an air-raid alert and directing people to the nearest shelter, a corridor leading to a shelter inside a building with signs in English and Ukrainian, and a Kyiv building damaged in a Russian attack, its upper floors collapsed and its interior exposed.
Drones and the defense budget
Tamaki's argument on drones lands in a live debate over how Japan spends its defense budget. Intercepting low-cost drones with costly missiles is unsustainable, he said, and he proposed directing roughly half the budget toward unmanned systems.
He framed the visit as part of an opposition role in diplomacy, separate from the government's, and said Japan should draw lessons from what Ukraine has learned at the front.