{"id":38370,"date":"2024-10-04T15:55:47","date_gmt":"2024-10-04T22:55:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ourstarblazers.com\/vault\/?p=38370"},"modified":"2024-10-16T09:54:33","modified_gmt":"2024-10-16T16:54:33","slug":"988a","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ourstarblazers.com\/vault\/988a\/","title":{"rendered":"Shigeru Ishiba: Fun facts to know and yell"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"2410icon\"<\/p>\n

The flow of time made it inevitable; sooner or later, a member of the Yamato<\/em> generation would eventually rise to the height of political power. That has now happened the appointment of Shigeru Ishiba as Japan’s prime minister. What fan cred does he bring to the table? Let’s find out.<\/p>\n

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The flow of time made it inevitable; sooner or later, a member of the Yamato<\/em> generation would eventually rise to the height of political power. That has now happened the appointment of Shigeru Ishiba as Japan’s prime minister. What fan cred does he bring to the table? Let’s find out.<\/p>\n

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Ishiba Shigeru’s “favorite singer” is Hiromi Iwasaki, and The Candies are
\n“in my memories,” along with some surprising song choices<\/h2>\n

Published by Yorozoo News on September 29. See the original article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Shigeru Ishiba (67), the new president of the Liberal Democratic Party, is known as a fan of 1970s idols. It’s well known that he’s a Candies<\/a> fan, but that’s not all. When I interviewed Ishiba in January of this year, we also talked about songs.<\/p>\n

(EDIT)<\/p>\n

When asked about his specific “favorite songs,” Ishiba told me, “I wrote about them in a magazine,” and he brought out the February issue of Bungeishunju<\/em>. In the feature, “My Top 3 Showa-era Songs,” Ishiba wrote about his thoughts on the songs he chose. <\/p>\n

Alongside The Candies’ Yasashii Akuma<\/em> (1977), Ishiba chose Hiromi Iwasaki’s Galaxy Legend<\/em> (1980). The song was played during intermissions at Toei theaters screening Be Forever Yamato<\/em>, and was used as the ending theme for the first and second episodes of the next TV anime series, Yamato III<\/em>. Ishiba defined it as “a masterpiece by Hiromi Iwasaki, who has outstanding vocal talent,” and added, “For us, the Space Battleship Yamato<\/em> generation, it leaves a strong impression, along with Isao Sasaki’s heroic theme song.” He also mentioned his feelings about the classic anime. <\/p>\n

Will Ishiba be able to maintain this “mind of independence” within the ruling party even at the top of the government? We will be keeping an eye on Ishiba, who has been comforted and encouraged by songs.<\/p>\n

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Otaku in Chief<\/h2>\n

How will Shigeru Ishiba becoming Prime Minister impact Japan\u2019s pop culture?<\/h3>\n

by Matt Alt, posted September 30 at his Pure Invention<\/em> blog<\/a><\/p>\n

After many tries, career politician Shigeru Ishiba has taken the reins of Japan\u2019s Liberal Democratic Party. It is a party many feel is neither liberal nor democratic, even corrupt to its very core, but those are hot takes for another time. What is a fact is that the LDP has been in almost continuous power since 1955 \u2013 the year after the very first Godzilla<\/em> movie came out, just to put a pin in it for you pop-culture vultures. In Japan\u2019s parliamentary system, the party in power selects the Prime Minister, which means Ishiba will be Japan\u2019s head of state for a time, effective October 1.<\/p>\n

For the grown-ups interested in sensible takes on what this augurs from a geopolitical standpoint, I highly recommend Tobias Harris\u2019 Observing Japan<\/em>. In the meantime, I\u2019ve got the perpetual-adolescent angle covered. Because \u2013 I know you\u2019re thinking what I\u2019m thinking. The big, big question. What does Ishiba\u2019s ascent mean for Japanese pop culture?!<\/p>\n

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Photos of Ishiba cosplaying as Majin Buu from Dragon Ball Z<\/em> several years back have been making the rounds online. He is known to have a passion for building military model kits \u2014 so much so, in fact, that he used his connections as defense minister to dispatch Self-Defense Forces armor for display at the Shizuoka Hobby Show, a tradition that continues to this day. His office is decorated with miniature aircraft and ships and figurines of the 70s idol group The Candies. He has by his own admission seen the 1978 film Farewell to Yamato<\/em> over a hundred times, and \u201calways cries at the same place.\u201d (He didn\u2019t say which, but I suspect Patrick Macias knows.) Ishiba has blogged about Godzilla<\/em>. He says that rivals in the party nicknamed him a \u201cleft-wing military otaku.\u201d<\/p>\n

Otaku. There it is. Once a slur, then practically a crime, and later a rallying cry for kidults across Japan. Adult fan cultures, once dismissed as abnormal behavior, are integral to post-industrial Japan\u2019s health as a society, and its interactions with the global dialogue. Ishiba is coming into power at a time when Japanese pop culture is more popular than ever abroad, and when the Japanese government is more active than ever in exploiting it for the purposes of global diplomacy. He wasn\u2019t the architect of any of these plans, but he will be inheriting them. As the first Prime Minister to admit to weeping at viewings of Yamato<\/em>, Ishiba would seem inclined to believe in the value of soft power and cultural diplomacy (even if, he said, he \u201cdidn\u2019t think foreigners would really understand\u201d Yamato<\/em>. Seriously? I\u2019ve got Patrick on speed-dial here, Mr. Prime Minister.)<\/p>\n

Japan is thriving as a pop-cultural superpower for the moment. But it faces very real difficulties in maintaining, for lack of a better term, this anime supremacy \u2013 difficulties that will be a challenge to any leader, no matter how talented or sympathetic.<\/p>\n

One of the biggest issues is demographic. Japan is a hyper-aged society. But anime and manga, the cornerstones of Cool Japan, are youth cultures. I\u2019ve written about how the nation currently punches way outside of its age-class before. But the demographics of a hyper-aged society are scary and real, and barring some sort of Handmaid\u2019s Tale<\/em> style intervention to compel pregnancies, they’re not going to change anytime soon. This fact of life has big implications for the future of Japanese pop culture in two key ways, one long-term, and another in a much closer timeframe.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Long term first: with fewer and fewer young people, how will Japan continue to make the illustrated entertainment that the world loves? The obvious solution to the problem of less kids is creating (or re-creating) society in such a way that citizens are inclined to have more children. But to date, the best the government \u2013 which is to say the LDP \u2013 has managed on this front is launching a national dating app, to much-deserved derision. <\/p>\n

Ishiba, who\u2019s taking the reins of a party that is historically notoriously, shockingly, deafeningly out of touch with the very women they want having more babies, is going to have his work cut out for him on this front. But a recent YouTube video did not inspire confidence. He lamented that inter-company dating and marriages are no longer the norm, while failing to touch on the reason why: women were traditionally pressured to quit when they tied the knot.<\/p>\n

In the short term, the ruling party\u2019s reluctance to address declining marriage rates and birthrates on a socio-political level means they gravitate toward technological solutions to the problems posed by shrinking older societies. In June, the government announced a \u201cNew Cool Japan Strategy.\u201d It is designed to remedy the many flaws of the \u201cOld\u201d Cool Japan initiatives (chief among them the predictable lack of financial oversight that drove it millions into the red.) <\/p>\n

The new strategy proposes doubling the size of the nation\u2019s content-production industries by training young creators on \u201cdigital technologies.\u201d What this means isn\u2019t precisely made clear, but we know that the LDP is wildly gung-ho for AI, as I wrote about a few months back. The paradox of how Japan can lead in original, human-made content while being \u201cthe most AI friendly nation on the planet\u201d still remains fundamentally unsolved. And we simply do not know where Ishiba stands on this particular issue. He wasn\u2019t part of the reporting on the topic, and doesn\u2019t seem to have made any public statements about it at all.<\/p>\n

And regardless of what his colleagues may call him, it\u2019s reductive to call Ishiba an otaku. He\u2019s a wonk, certainly, but not a nerd or fanboy. He says the cosplay was forced upon him, in an echo of Abe\u2019s brief turn as Mario during the closing ceremony of the Rio Olympics. And the things he likes \u2013 idol singers, plastic models, Yamato<\/em> \u2013 would have been tough to miss for any young person growing up in the 70s.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

But the fact that he openly talks about them is an indication of how much things have changed over the decades. When Ishiba was young, authority figures treated manga and anime (and later video games) as vices to be curbed. A wide variety of organizations actively protested the mediums for supposedly sparking anti-social behavior. In the 80s, a horrific crime sparked a moral panic that linked the words \u201cotaku\u201d and \u201cmurderer\u201d in the public mind. The word \u201cotaku\u201d became so radioactive that NHK wouldn\u2019t even allow it to be spoken on air until after the turn of the Millennium.<\/p>\n

Despite all of this hand-wringing on the part of authorities, manga and anime continued to be consumed, in absolutely massive quantities. At its peak in the mid-90s Weekly Shonen Jump<\/em>, home to hits like Dragon Ball<\/em> and Jojo\u2019s Bizarre Adventure<\/em>, was moving 6.5 million copies every week. As post-Bubble Japan became post-Industrial Japan, it was almost inevitable that such a robust pop-cultural industry, not to mention fanbase, would begin to attract the attention of politicians, the younger ranks of which were undoubtedly illicit consumers themselves. Douglas McGray\u2019s 2002 Foreign Policy feature \u201cJapan\u2019s Gross National Cool\u201d gave politicos the fig-leaf they needed to make it official: Japan was a pop-culture superpower, and needed to start acting like one. So they did.<\/p>\n

Ishiba may well have the biggest collection of model kits in Parliament, but he won\u2019t be Japan\u2019s first Prime Minister to appeal to otaku sensibilities. That would be Taro Aso, who served as P.M. for less than a year from mid-2008 to mid-2009. As Foreign Minister in the early 00s, Aso made Japan\u2019s soft power a plank in his platform, ostentatiously reading copies of the gothic fantasy manga Rozen Maiden<\/em>, launching the ongoing International Manga Award, and even, in a fever-dream moment, attempting to convince Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to invest in a Russo-Japanese Doraemon<\/em> feature. Not everyone was impressed by his boosterism: Hayao Miyazaki called Aso\u2019s manga reading \u201cembarrassing\u201d and \u201csomething that should be done in private.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In the end, the proclivities and even the policies of the Prime Minister might have very little effect on the propagation of pop culture at all. The whole thing about pop culture is that it is popular: populist, grass-roots, the exact opposite of something that can be legislated, let alone exploited, by something as inherently uncool as a bureaucracy. <\/p>\n

In 2015, years after Aso\u2019s run as P.M., the media-studies professor Koichi Iwabuchi wrote a scathing report about Japan\u2019s official promotional efforts, which he declared merely \u201ca one-way projection of Japanese culture,\u201d more akin to propaganda than progress, designed to stoke the egos of citizens rather than build bridges between cultures.<\/p>\n

That global interest in Japan\u2019s pop culture continues to grow even as Cool Japan efforts have crashed and burned certainly makes you think Iwabuchi was on to something. Do any of these foreign fans really care about Japanese politics? Who knows! But I predict that pop culture will continue to play a growing role in the Japanese government\u2019s interactions with the world. Whether those interactions are clumsy and halting, or healing and invigorating, is up to the people in charge. All we can do is wait and see how Ishiba\u2019s efforts on this front will play out. But if a cosplaying, model-building, Yamato<\/em>-watching, Godzilla<\/em>-blogging Prime Minister can\u2019t make Japan cool, who can?<\/p>\n

Find more by Matt Alt at his Youtube channel here<\/a> and learn more about his book Pure Invention<\/em> here<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Listen to his podcast Pure Tokyoscope<\/em> with Patrick Macias here<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

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Previous Ishiba sightings:<\/h2>\n

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September 3, 2020: Prime Minister candidate Shigeru Ishiba<\/h3>\n

Before Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party chose Yoshihide Suga as the nation’s new Prime Minister in September, one of the leading candidates was Shigeru Ishiba, who endeared himself to anime fans as one of the chief advocates of the “Cool Japan” policy. He re-established his bona fides in a September 3 interview with this simple statement: “I like Space Battleship Yamato.\u201d<\/em> This was his fourth unsuccessful bid for party leadership.<\/p>\n

Back in April, he made a public appearance dressed as a Dragonball<\/em> character (above right) and said that, “If it were up to me, I’d have chosen Captain Okita of Space Battleship Yamato. Earth\u2026such good memories.<\/em> That line makes me cry.”<\/p>\n

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December 28, 2021: Radio show<\/h3>\n

Shigeru Ishiba is a name that last came up in Report 51<\/a> when he made an unsuccessful run for Prime Minister. Had he won, he would have been the first Yamato<\/em> fan to be in charge of Japan. Instead, he remains in our fold. The following article about him was published at JOQR<\/a> on December 28\u2026<\/p>\n

Shigeru Ishiba and Kyohira Furuya Talk about Space Battleship Yamato<\/em><\/span><\/h3>\n

On December 30th at 8pm, Bunka Hoso will broadcast a special year-end dialogue between Shigeru Ishiba and Kyohira Furuya, talking about Space Battleship Yamato<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Writer Kyoshiro Furuya, who is a Wednesday commentator on News Wide Sakidori<\/em>, declared himself a “fan of Ishiba” when the program covered the Liberal Democratic Party presidential election. Since Furuya and Ishiba have the anime Space Battleship Yamato<\/em> in common, Furuya’s dream of “discussing Space Battleship Yamato<\/em> with Mr. Ishiba” came true in this special program.<\/p>\n

Furuya asked Ishiba about the appeal of the Yamato<\/em> series. Mr. Ishiba, who was a university student when Farewell to Yamato<\/em> was released, went to the movie theater three days in a row from the first day and said, “I was continuously moved from beginning to end. I saw it four times on the first day, three times the next day, and twice the day after that. No matter how many times I saw it, I would always cry at the same point,” he recalled, highly praising the film. “There was no Yamato<\/em> before it, and there was no Yamato<\/em> after it.”<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Toward the end of the program, Mr. Furuya asked, “If Earth were to be invaded in the future, around the year 2200, what position would you like to hold, Mr. Ishiba? Would you be the Director General of the Earth Defense Forces? Or would you board Yamato<\/em>?”<\/p>\n

Mr. Ishiba referred to the dispatch of the Self-Defense Forces to Iraq when he was the Director General of the Defense Agency. “When I sent the SDF to Iraq, I was often told, ‘If you’re going to give orders like that, you should go yourself.’ I tried many times to go, but every time I tried, the media found out. I was scolded by then Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuo Fukuda, who said, ‘I understand that you want to go, but if you do, you will cause trouble for everyone’.”<\/p>\n

In addition to the above, the program included \u201cSpace Battleship Yamato<\/em> from the Meta Perspective of Postwar Japan,” “Ishiba’s Choice of Great Lines from Yamato<\/em>,” and “Can Collective Self-Defense Be Established Between Earth and Gamilas?”<\/p>\n

Friend-of-the-website Minoru Itgaki listened to the program and recalled that when Mr. Ishiba was asked if Yamato<\/em> could be operated under current Japanese laws, his response was “no problem.” So that’s a relief.<\/p>\n

<\/br><\/p>\n

Return to previous article<\/a><\/p>\n

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