The US-born TV presenter who is carrying the weight of a political dynasty

Tokyo: The valleys carve through the clouds in Yamaguchi in southern Japan. This is puffer fish country, where the deadly meat is a local delicacy. It was once the land of wealthy samurai. Now it is the home of prime ministers.

Eight Japanese leaders have come from this fertile region sprinkled with Meiji-era wooden houses and a population of 1.3 million. Five have come from Tokyo, population 40 million.

Three have come from one family in Yamaguchi, the Abe-Kishi clan that has dominated Japanese politics for the past century. Now it only has one scion left: a US-born, 32-year-old, former TV presenter carrying the weight of a political dynasty teetering on the edge.

Nobuchiyo Kishi is the last scion of a family that has dominated Japanese politics for a century. Credit: Matt Davidson

Nobuchiyo Kishi is in a delicate position. Japan is changing. The hereditary political system that has delivered 30 per cent of MPs to parliament and half of Japan’s current cabinet is under attack.

So is his family. His uncle and Japan’s longest-serving prime minister Shinzo Abe was assassinated in 2022 over his links to the Unification Church, a religious group that had long propped up the ruling party that his great-grandfather founded: the Liberal Democratic Party.

The assassination did not generate the sympathy for Abe and his legacy that many would expect. Instead, it focused criticism on the underhanded and antiquated practices of a party that has ruled for much of the last century but is now polling at 20 per cent.

Yamaguchi MP Nobuchiyo Kishi campaigning during the 2023 byelection.

“I realise now we seem a bit outdated,” Kishi says in an interview in his Parliamentary office in Tokyo, where he is now serving his first term as the MP for Yamaguchi’s second district.

Kishi succeeded his father, former defence minister Nobuo Kishi in the seat in March last year. Nobuo is Abe’s younger brother, but he was adopted by his maternal uncle who could not have children of his own and took his family name.

Nobuchiyo Kishi has kept a very low profile since then.

Securing this interview took more than a year of negotiation. Kishi’s reluctance is understandable in a country that measures its political careers in decades, not years. If he raises his profile too high too early, the weight of years of entitlement threatens to bear down on him.

He scoffs at suggestions he might be prime minister one day. “I’ve got to do the work first,” he says.

That starts by marking out positions that are different from his predecessors.

The son of Japan’s most famous political family believes hereditary politics is holding Japan back.

“We need new blood. We need more people interested in politics, and we need a system that enables people to participate,” says Kishi. “It’s not something that people from the outside can change. It needs to come from within.”

The “three-bans” is the iron law of Japanese politics. Jiban (base), kaban (a bag full of money) and kanban (the family profile of the candidate).

Yamaguchi factory worker Ryuuji Ebisutani is frustrated with hereditary politics. Credit: Christopher Jue

The frustration within the community is palpable. “In Japan, you can just become a politician just by having a politician father,” says 21-year-old Yamaguchi factory worker Ryuuji Ebisutani. “They’re looking after themselves more than the local community.”

Kishi wants to turn around deep-seated scepticism from the local community and convince them they have a role in Japanese politics. The turnout for Japan’s last election was just 56 per cent. The LDP has been in power almost continuously since 1955. But with few viable alternatives and a weak opposition – a general malaise has set in, particularly among its youth.

Kishi believes that to re-engage young voters, the Japanese government needs to change how it thinks about society. For too long its collectivist approach has driven inefficiency in a system that rewards loyalty over individuality. Japanese businessmen and women can spend decades at one company, reducing productivity. The same rules can often transfer to the home, where rigid gender roles are now colliding with falling birth rates. Japan is the only country in the world where a husband and wife must have the same name.

Kishi’s father and former defence minister Nobuo Kishi. Credit: Viola Kam

“I believe we need to emphasise each person’s individuality,” he says. “That’s how my generation wants to live.”

Kishi, studied at Keio University in Tokyo and then like his grandfather, former foreign minister Shintaro Abe, had a brief career as a reporter. He is progressive on climate change and childcare and supports moving Japan from one of the world’s last sole custody systems towards joint custody.

But he is aligned on many of the conservative issues that defined his uncle and his father – including updating Japan’s post-World War II Constitution to give it the right to settle disputes using military force.

“Japan is the only developed country that has never changed its Constitution. For example, Germany, another defeated country, changed its constitution 60 times after the war,” he says.

In the Abe-Kishi household, the dinner party chat regularly ranged from constitutional reform to national security to economic development. “It was just part of my daily life,” Kishi says.

The last time he spoke to his uncle was a month before he was gunned down in Nara.

It was the 94th birthday party hosted by Abe for his mother – Yoko Abe, known in Japan as the “godmother” of Japanese politics for the influence she wielded as the matriarch of the Abe dynasty for more than six decades. That night Kishi stood surrounded by Abe, Yoko, his father Nobuo and other family members as they sang Happy Birthday. It was the last time they would be photographed together.

The last photo of Yoko Abe (left), Shinzo Abe (centre), Nobuchiyo Kishi (back) and Nobuo Kishi (right) together.

Abe never had kids, so he doted on his nephew. “They loved us very much since we were little,” Kishi says.

Abe barbecued and cooked Yakisoba noodles. Often he would transform into a game show host at Christmas and family birthdays. The dinners were one of the few places Japan’s longest-serving prime minister could let off steam.

Then the news came through on a warm summer day in July 2022. Kishi was in his office when he was told Abe had been shot by Tetsuya Yamagami, a 41-year-old former member of Japan’s self-defence forces with a homemade shotgun. Kishi, who was then working as his father’s secretary in the Ministry of Defence was still in shock when he had to start fielding media queries about the identity of the assassin as part of his job.

“It’s still even today hard for me to accept,” he says.

He thinks about the last photograph taken of all of them together. Abe is dead, his mother Yoko died in February aged 95, and his father Nobuo has retired from politics for health reasons. Only Kishi remains in the family business.

“It all changed so drastically, like in a flash,” he says.

Kishi wrestles with his dynastic lineage. His website once prominently featured his family tree back to his great-grandfather Kan Abe, the first Abe to hold a seat of Yamaguchi in 1937. Then it was suddenly taken down after blowback from the community.

“Hereditary politicians are one of Japan’s bad cultures,” says Aichirou Maeda, a store owner in Yamaguchi. “It’s all about money, money, money. You want to give the same to your son, and your son wants to give the same to his son. So it’s fertile soil for bad influences.”

Aichirou Maeda and Hiroe Maeda outside their store in Yamaguchi. Credit: Christopher Jue

Kishi maintained the deletion of the family tree was due to a technical problem with the website. It has not reappeared more than a year after it was first removed.

Tobias Harris, a Japan analyst and former political staffer in Toko who wrote Abe’s biography The Iconoclast, said it was an inauspicious start to a political career.

“I mean it just shows the challenge of his position,” he says. “His very existence is not popular.”

Kishi says he wants to put a stop to entrenched hereditary politics. But he is surrounded by the icons of his family. In his office in Tokyo, photos of his grandfather greeting former US President Richard Nixon, a portrait of his slain uncle and a cartoon of his father all hang on the wall.

At 32, Kishi is eight years younger than Abe and 13 years younger than his father when they first became elected officials.

“It’s remarkable when you look at the path of previous generations into politics,” says Harris. “He is exceptionally young. It goes to show how unprepared the dynasty was for generational change.”

Abe’s death and Nobuo’s retirement accelerated that process before Kishi could get comfortable with his new profile. He twitches in his seat, revealing his shirt cuffs embroidered with his last name. The symbolism of his family identity travels with him everywhere.

The sense of family duty was instilled from birth by his grandmother Yoko, who not only guided her husband Shintaro’s career to the top of the foreign ministry but also her son Shinzo, who still lived with his mother in Shibuya while he was prime minister.

“The LDP of the present was made by my father Kishi Nobusuke,” she said. “You must never forget those great footprints.”

Harris says the 95-year-old was instrumental to the Abe family’s political strategy, including selecting Kishi as the heir.

“In her final years, she was deeply involved in debates within the family over how to manage the transition to the next generation,” he wrote after her death in February.

“[But] at the time of Yoko’s death, it is very much in doubt whether her political project – the persistence of the Abe-Kishi family as the bearer of her father’s ideals into the future – outlasts her.”

Kishi takes comfort in the spiritual home of the dynasty at the Itsukushima shrine in Shimonoseki. A calligraphy drawing by Abe hangs in the shrine’s tatami tea room. Yoko was a skilled calligrapher. The training she gave her son is still visible in the script above the doorway of the centuries-old shrine.

Yasuhisa Arishima, the head priest of Itsukushima shrine, in front of a calligraphy painting by Shinzo Abe. Credit: Christopher Jue

The shrine’s head priest Yasuhisa Arishima has worshipped at Itsukushima for more than 50 years. He says the calligraphy translates as nature intended.

“Whatever happens, basically there’s no need to fret,” he says. “Just keep your vision as straight as possible.”

Kishi will need to stay focused. Two threats to the Abe dynasty are now imminent.

The Abe faction named after his uncle and grandfather was dissolved in February after it was embroiled in a political kickbacks scandal that has threatened to tear the LDP apart. The practice of taking home political donations was well entrenched before Kishi joined parliament, but the demise of what was once Japan’s largest faction has eliminated a vital power base for the young MP at a critical time.

His electorate also faces a redistribution that will see the Yamaguchi region lose one of its four seats, opening the door to local rivals ready to pounce on growing dissatisfaction with hereditary politics. Kishi won his seat last year with just 52 per cent of the vote. His father Nobuo was recording votes as high as 70 per cent by the time he left office.

Kishi is single and has no children. His brother and cousins are not interested in politics.

“The family’s political future rests, it seems, on Kishi,” says Harris.

Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi with Yoko Abe, Shintaro Abe and grandson Shinzo Abe (centre).

Harris argues there is a symmetry to this story. When Yoko met Abe and Nobuo’s father Shintaro in 1951, her father Nobusuke, a wartime cabinet minister, was struggling to return to government after being labelled a suspected Class A war criminal by the United States.

Shintaro, then a newspaper reporter, was the orphaned son of Kan, who had established the Abe family as the pre-war powerbrokers of Yamaguchi but whose legacy was now receding into the past.

“There was little to suggest that the family would yield some of the most influential figures of the postwar era,” said Harris.

“Now, after three generations of prominence and power, the dynasty is once again rebuilding from a single parliamentary seat in Yamaguchi prefecture.”

With Hama Kato and Kyoko Onoki

Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for the weekly What in the World newsletter here.