Do we like Shinji Ishimaru?
Our score: 5 out of 10. Nothing harmful found and a mixed good-person picture, with too little on record about people and the planet to go higher.
Shinji Ishimaru is a former mayor of a small western Japanese city who went from local politics to a national name. He ran for Tokyo governor in 2024 and, as an independent, finished second behind the incumbent, Yuriko Koike, on the back of an online campaign.
After that he wanted a bigger project. In late 2024 he announced a regional party to contest Tokyo's metropolitan assembly, saying he had no intention of endorsing a governor's ruling party. The party, Path to Rebirth, launched in January 2025 with no policy platform at all and members free to set their own agendas.
It went badly. All 42 of its candidates lost the June 2025 Tokyo assembly election, and all 10 lost in the July upper house vote. One candidate left the party saying she was affected by criticism from some of Ishimaru's fans, which is on the fans, not him. He stepped down as leader and the party said it would install an AI as its nominal leader.
On the harm test, we found nothing: no campaigning against LGBTQ+ or trans people, nothing demeaning about women or migrants, and no vaccine or climate claims from him. That's partly because his party deliberately had no platform. We also couldn't find his stance on those topics at all, so call it a clean but thin record rather than a glowing one.
The good-person side is murkier. In 2024 he announced on his YouTube show he would refuse interviews with Nippon TV and then TBS, after taking offence at their election coverage. In 2025 a civic group filed a criminal complaint alleging that the cost of a livestreamed campaign event may have broken election law. Ishimaru said he would follow the authorities' instructions, and we found no outcome.
On the good stuff, we couldn't find charity work, causes or kind acts to point to, so we won't invent any. He did get a lot of voters, especially online, interested in politics, and he wound the party's leadership back to a younger figure after the losses. That's honestly the whole list.