Do we like Katsunobu Kato?
Our score: 5 out of 10. A long, clean-looking career as a senior government figure, but very little on record about LGBTQ+ rights or his personal conduct either way.
Katsunobu Kato is a veteran Liberal Democratic Party MP who has spent most of his career in the inner circle of government. He was Chief Cabinet Secretary under Yoshihide Suga, essentially the government's chief spokesman, and later finance minister under Shigeru Ishiba. He is not a celebrity so much as a safe pair of hands in a dark suit.
His big moment came in September 2024, when he ran for the party leadership. He pitched a stimulus package and a push to double household incomes through higher wages, saying Japan was on the cusp of emerging from deflation. He lost, but Ishiba then made him finance minister, which is a fair consolation prize.
As finance minister he spent much of 2025 managing the fallout from Donald Trump's tariffs, telling Bloomberg that Japan would closely monitor the impact on the yen. That is dull, competent-sounding work rather than culture-war material, and nothing in what we read suggests he used the job to push anyone down.
The harm check is where it gets thin. In March 2021, as Chief Cabinet Secretary, he said he had not read the Sapporo ruling on same-sex marriage in detail and that the government would carefully watch the other cases. That is cautious rather than hostile, but it is also not support. We found no statement of his own either way since.
The contested bit is history. In 2021 he said the government keeps the 1993 Kono Statement on comfort women, but also repeated the line that official investigations found no records directly indicating forced abduction by the military or authorities. Where you land depends on whether you read that as sticking to the official line or as quietly narrowing an apology that survivors fought for.
On the good-person side, no lawsuit, conviction or misconduct allegation against him turned up, and we found no reports of how he treats staff. We also found no donations or causes to put in the good column. That is honestly the whole list, so treat this as a middling score on thin information rather than a clean bill of health. Nothing recent turned up on him lately either.