Do we like Koichi Hagiuda?
Our score: 4 out of 10. No harmful words of his own turned up, but unanswered church-link allegations and a funding scandal in his orbit keep this well short of a yes.
Hagiuda is a long-serving ruling-party operator in Japan, a former minister under Abe-era governments who now sits as the Liberal Democratic Party's executive acting secretary-general under Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi. He was in the news in late 2025 for a trip to Taipei, where he met Taiwan's president. That's the profile of a bloke who has been close to the centre of power for a very long time.
The story that follows him is the Unification Church. Tansa's investigation, built on the church's own internal reports, says church leaders described him as a “hotline” to the LDP and alleges he helped arrange meetings with Abe. The church disputes the reliability of those reports, and the claims are the church's characterisations, not court findings.
Asked about it, Hagiuda did not reply to Tansa by its deadline. His secretary told the outlet he has no direct connection to the church as an organisation but may have met people from an affiliated group. He then asked media not to cover a rally during the campaign. That's not a denial, and it's not an explanation either.
Then there's the party funding mess. A citizen panel in 2024 pushed prosecutors to look again at the case against his policy secretary, and in 2026 another panel backed the decision not to charge Hagiuda and seven other former Abe faction members. So he has not been charged, but he was in the room when it all blew up.
On the harm check, we found no words of his own against LGBTQ+ people, women or migrants in what we could open, and that is a genuine gap rather than a clean bill. The one blunt-edged moment on record is from 2019, when as education minister his remarks about exam fairness were widely read as accepting inequality. He apologised and the English tests were put off.
On the good side, the record we could verify is thin: a Taiwan visit in which he called for cooperation to go beyond semiconductors, and he thanked Taipei for lifting food import limits. China complained about the trip. That's diplomacy, not a kind act, so we're not scoring it as one.