Do we like Mizuho Fukushima?
Our score: 7 out of 10. A long record on the right side, including a cabinet exit over a promise, with party infighting and a thin LGBTQ+ paper trail holding it back.
Mizuho Fukushima was born in 1955 and has been a fixture of Japanese politics for decades. She went from the law into the House of Councillors and rose through the Social Democratic Party. She was its secretary general in 2001, then leader in 2003, deputy leader in 2013 and leader again from 2020.
Her big moment came in 2009, when she joined the cabinet as Minister of State for Consumer Affairs and Food Safety, for Gender Equality and for Measures for Declining Birthrate. The government's own Upper House profile lists those posts. That makes her one of the few leaders of a small party to have held ministerial office.
The story that defines her is Okinawa. In May 2010 the then Prime Minister dismissed her from cabinet after she refused to back his deal keeping a US Marine base on the island. He had promised to move it off Okinawa. She then took her party out of the ruling coalition, saying it did not want to “violate the public’s trust”. Whatever you think of her politics, that is a leader walking away from power over a promise.
On the harm check, nothing nasty from her turned up: no slurs, no conspiracy theories, no attacks on trans people or migrants in what I read. The catch is that I found little on her LGBTQ+ record in particular, so that pass rests on the absence of harm and on a career that has included the gender equality brief. There is no obvious company-keeping problem either, since her work is mostly party politics.
The recent trouble is internal. She and her former deputy fell out over the party's candidate for an Okinawa seat in the February election, which the party's own Okinawa chapter strongly opposed. Her former deputy resigned and then ran against her for leader. Fukushima won the runoff 2,364 votes to 1,792, then apologised for “a lack of consideration” when her rival walked out of a news conference. Critics, including some party members, say her leadership is too dictatorial, which is the side of this story she needs to answer.
She says her style is to travel the country and listen to voters, and she pitched herself in March as someone who would lead the party from the front. The Okinawa row is a fair test of that claim, because the people she is accused of not listening to are her own party's islanders. Overall she looks decent and consistent, with a messy leadership fight to sort out.