Do we like Toru Hashimoto?
Our score: 5 out of 10. One real 2013 stain and a pugnacious TV habit, with little confirmed good on the other side, makes a thin and mixed picture.
Hashimoto is a lawyer who became a TV face before he became a politician. He set up his own law office at 28 and made his name on out-of-court settlements, then took the TV commentator route. An author encouraged him to run, and he became Osaka governor in 2008, then swapped to mayor in a 2011 double election.
The moment most people overseas know him for came in May 2013. As Osaka mayor and co-leader of the Japan Restoration Party, he told a news conference that the wartime comfort women system was “something necessary”, whether the women went willingly or not. His own party called it his private opinion, and the Japanese government kept its distance.
He then tried to walk it back, and it went badly. He retracted a separate remark about US troops, called the wartime system an “inexcusable act”, and said he had never condoned it. Two former comfort women cancelled a meeting with him, though, and two Japanese papers called the apology a failure. Here, an apology only counts if the acts change after it, and I found nothing since that repeats the remark.
On the wider harm check, the record I could confirm is thin. I found nothing from him on LGBTQ+ or trans people, vaccines or climate, in either direction, so there is no good or bad to report. The one clear black mark is the 2013 episode, which is why this is a pass with an asterisk and not a clean sheet.
As a TV commentator, he has been in the middle of the Masahiro Nakai storm. Fuji TV's third-party committee found sexual violence in the case, and Nakai's lawyers disputed that. Hashimoto said on air that Nakai had sexual contact against the woman's will, but many people would not call it sexual violence. He was criticised for how he framed it, and said he could not disclose his sources.
He has also been throwing punches at his own side. In late 2025 he attacked Ishin co-leader Fumitake Fujita over Akahata's report of about 20 million yen in payments to a company run by Fujita's publicly funded secretary. Hashimoto said that if profits were made, “it amounts to public-funds money laundering”. Fujita says everything was appropriate and that there is “nothing in particular” between them.