Do we like Hirofumi Yoshimura?
Our score: 5 out of 10. Two real stains (the sister-city split over a comfort women memorial and the iodine gargling push) and little known on LGBTQ+ issues leave him mid-table.
Hirofumi Yoshimura wears two hats: governor of Osaka Prefecture and leader of Nippon Ishin no Kai, the Japan Innovation Party. He came up through Osaka politics, serving as the city's mayor before moving up to the prefecture, and in February 2026 he won his third governor's race.
In October 2025 his party struck a deal to back Sanae Takaichi's LDP government without sending a minister to her cabinet. Ishin handed her 12 policy asks, including a one-tenth cut in parliamentary seats, free high school education and a two-year pause on the consumption tax for food. Yoshimura called it a “very difficult decision”, and conceded that most parties that joined LDP coalitions “disappeared”. Critics note Ishin was founded to shake up the establishment it now props up.
His great obsession is the Osaka metropolis plan, which would scrap Osaka city and reorganise it into special wards under the prefecture. Voters rejected it in 2015 and 2020, yet he and the mayor resigned and won re-election on 8 February 2026, with the major parties other than Ishin not even fielding candidates. He says he wants a vote by spring 2027. Friday Digital, a Japanese weekly magazine (take it with salt), reports he once pledged never to challenge the plan again, and that opposition parties called his election-day event a farce.
The latest chapter came in July. Ishin and the LDP pushed their backup-capital bill through the upper house by two votes, but only after Ishin accepted opposition demands barring the Osaka referendum from the same day as next year's unified local elections. Yoshimura signalled the party would still push for a referendum next spring, and the DPFP leader Yuichiro Tamaki condemned that stance.
On the harm check, the biggest mark is the comfort women dispute. As Osaka mayor he ended a six-decade sister-city tie with San Francisco after it accepted a memorial to the women, citing “disagreement among historians”. San Francisco's mayor's office called that unfortunate and a campaigner called it “outrageous and absurd”. Where you land depends on whether you read it as a stand on contested history or as a slight to survivors; we lean towards the second reading.
The other stain is public health. In 2020 he told a press briefing that gargling povidone-iodine was “worth giving a try”, and drugstores ran out of mouthwash. The WHO's Kobe centre said there was no scientific evidence it prevents COVID-19, and doctors warned about thyroid risks. He later tweeted that it does not have a clear prevention effect, but a clarification is not a campaign of denial, and it was one episode.