Do we like Yuichiro Tamaki?
Our score: 5 out of 10. Delivers on cost-of-living politics and owned up fast on his affair, but his foreigners-and-healthcare claim was called misleading and nothing on LGBTQ+ rights turned up.
Tamaki is the face of Japan's Democratic Party for the People, a mid-sized opposition party that has made itself hard to ignore by selling one thing: more money in your pay packet. He has just been handed a third term as leader, which he calls a “period for making preparations to seize power”. That is a bloke planning to be more than a minor party's boss.
The messy part of his story is the affair. In November 2024 a tabloid reported he'd had an extramarital affair with a model, and he fronted a hastily called press conference to say the report was “basically true” and to apologise. The party's lawmakers then voted unanimously to suspend him as leader for three months, saying he had damaged the party's honour and trust. He came back in March 2025. He owned it quickly, but it cost him leverage at a key moment.
On the harm test, the thing to know is his February 2025 post on X. He claimed foreigners can get tens of millions of yen in healthcare after just 90 days in Japan. Unseen Japan called that misleading, and put foreigners at roughly 1.15 per cent of high-cost healthcare spending. Tamaki denied on YouTube that he was stoking anti-foreigner sentiment, saying he wanted to crack down on people who come mainly for free care.
The Japanese Communist Party's paper Akahata ran an editorial calling his remark xenophobic. It also pointed to a party platform linking “death with dignity” to cutting medical spending. That's a partisan source, so weigh it accordingly. He also spoke at CPAC Japan in 2022 on the economy, though the page we read only covers his economic talk. We found nothing from him, for or against, on LGBTQ+ rights, so that's a gap rather than a tick.
The recent thing is the deal he cut with Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi's LDP in December 2025. The two parties agreed to lift the taxable income threshold from 1.6 million to 1.78 million yen. It covers earners up to 6.65 million yen a year, about 80 per cent of taxpayers, and cuts income tax by roughly 30,000 to 60,000 yen. The DPFP also got the environmental performance-linked car purchase tax scrapped.
That's the real good stuff on the record: a concrete, measurable cost-of-living win for ordinary workers, pushed by a smaller party using its leverage. It's policy, not charity, and we found no personal charity work to set beside it. Still, a tax cut for most of the country is more than many politicians manage.