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How Japan’s leader got stuck in the revolving door
Defying the odds, Ishiba is still PM. Will the LDP push for a recall election?
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Japan's Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba has leaned into an image that he is being “bullied” by others in his Liberal Democratic Party.
PHOTO: AFP
Gearoid Reidy
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The idea of the “revolving door” at the Kantei, the offices of Japan’s prime minister, is a longstanding trope of English-language coverage of politics here.
It became part of the parlance in the 1990s, amid US impatience at how frequently things changed at the top while the country suffered successive financial crises. The phrase carries an unpleasant colonial snootiness, a sense that the leader of one of the world’s biggest economies does not matter, that they will be gone so soon we do not need to bother remembering their name.
