Goobers, Godzilla, and Governors

Tokyo’s quest to find a new leader grinds to a conclusion

After reading last week’s essay about the weirdness of the Tokyo gubernatorial elections, you might wonder how things turned out. First things first: gubernatorial. I love letting this word roll off my tongue, but the initial syllable, I learned from an astute listener, is actually pronounced rhyming not with “gubber,” but rather fittingly, “goober.” Pure Invention regrets the mispronunciation. And laments a missed opportunity to say goober more often.

Speaking of guv’nors, the city’s latest is its last one. The incumbent Yuriko Koike won by a landslide, surprising many who thought her campaign might be derailed by embarrassing accusations of falsifying her academic credentials and criticisms over use of public funds. The most awesome of these alleged boondoggles involves none other than Godzilla, in the form of a controversially expensive series of public light shows, one of which pal Patrick Macias and I filmed for our Pure Tokyoscope podcast several weeks back. (Direct link to video here.) Much as I love the idea of my tax dollars being funneled into creating life-sized reproductions of kaiju, it’s hard to argue with those demanding more transparency in how the funds were allocated.

The real surprise was the strong second-place showing of “totally independent” candidate Shinji Ishimaru. Conventional wisdom assumed the mononymous Renho, a seasoned politician with twenty years of experience in parliament, would have been the one to give the beleaguered incumbent a run for her money. Ishimaru, on the other hand, is the former mayor of a tiny township in Hiroshima Prefecture, who only moved to Tokyo a week before campaign season began. Yet this outsider with little experience or connection to the city secured almost a quarter of the total votes.

As someone who’s actually served in public office, no matter how distant from Tokyo, Ishimaru wasn’t a stunt candidate. But his style blurs the line, spinning his lack of experience as his credential, framing outrageous invective as speaking truth to power, and knocking the status quo without offering concrete solutions of his own. And while most Japanese politicians have truly pathetic online presences, Ishimaru is a legitimate influencer whose YouTube channel and TikTok clips drew in young fans who probably wouldn’t have voted for any other candidate. His was a campaign buoyed less by a hope for change than a shared loss of faith in the system as a whole.

As I touched on last week, for a very long time in Japan, there has been a sort of firewall between what happens online and what happens in the public sphere. This has insulated Japanese society from much of the influencer-driven craziness that has shifted the American discourse over the last decade. But Ishimaru’s success at exploiting social media hints that these barriers may be falling. Videos of his speeches proliferated on social media, and he has a knack for viral stunts like jousting with other candidates over anime characters. Even his real-world campaigning had a kind of influencer flair; a performance I saw in Akihabara felt more like a couple of guys doing a podcast than a stump speech, and was thronged with fans holding up cell phones in hopes of catching a viral moment.

The final chapter of Pure Invention, the book from which this newsletter takes its name, chronicles a moment when the internet, anime fandom, and politics intersected in the mid-2010s. This is when things started to get really weird for America. Ishimaru may or may not win another race, but he’s the first of a new generation of Japanese politicians who understand how to harvest disenchanted voters from the internet, and he certainly won’t be the last.

And what of those stunt candidates? None of them, not the Joker, not the wacky ninety-something inventor, not the dude who’s delegated his decision-making to AI, none of them, secured even a single percentage point of the vote. And what of the Protect Japan from NHK Party, by far the biggest spoiler in this election cycle? You may recall that it fielded 24 candidates for the express purpose of selling off its space on election boards to whoever paid up. What sounded initially like an epic troll turned out to be a bust: they paid 72 million yen in registration fees, but only recouped 15 million yen in poster sales. Whoops! Whatever the case, a free election is a free election, and a hearty congratulations to all who participated in the 2024 Tokyo gubenetorial race — even the goobers.