Do we like Naoto Kan?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Owned his biggest failure, apologised to Korea and fought for renewables, though a pension lapse and a returned donation dent him and little turned up on LGBTQ+ issues.
Naoto Kan is the bloke who came up the hard way. He worked as a patent agent, got pulled into the citizens' movement, and ran the 1974 upper house campaign for women's suffrage leader Fusae Ichikawa. He lost his first few runs at parliament before finally winning a lower house seat in 1980, by his own account.
The defining chapter is Fukushima. As prime minister during the 2011 disaster, he told a 2012 Diet inquiry that the plant had operated as national policy and the state carried the biggest share of blame, adding he sincerely apologised for his failure to stop it. Critics said his government released too little information, while a private panel credited his hands-on involvement with preventing something worse.
It got petty afterwards. In 2013 Kan sued then prime minister Shinzo Abe for 11 million yen over an e-magazine item claiming Kan had ordered TEPCO to stop seawater cooling, which Kan said was false. In 2015 the Tokyo District Court dismissed the suit as opinion and commentary, and Abe hailed it as “a victory of truth”.
He's had his own stumbles. In 2004 Kan quit as Democratic Party leader after admitting he had missed national pension premiums. In 2011 his office returned a 1.04 million yen donation from a South Korean resident of Japan, with Kan's lawyer saying the return came once an official document confirmed the donor's nationality. Neither is a pattern of nastiness, but both are a bit rich for a bloke who built his name on clean politics.
On the harm check he comes up clean. In 2010 he issued a formal apology to Korea for Japan's colonial rule, offering “heartfelt apology” and “deep remorse”. Since Fukushima he has urged Japan to cut nuclear reliance and invest in solar, wind and biomass, telling a Cornell audience this could open a path to a peaceful world. We found nothing from him on LGBTQ+ rights either way, and that's an honest gap.
Nothing new on him lately. He announced his retirement from parliament in October 2024 after a 44-year career, calling for another change of government. A quiet exit for a bloke who ran the country through its worst crisis in decades.