January 25, 2025

Japanese Communist Party Executive Committee Chair Tamura Tomoko on January 24 at a press conference in the Diet building said that Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru’s policy speech delivered to the Diet earlier on the day epitomized the deadlock in the Liberal Democratic Party-led government’s policies.

Tamura pointed out that under the current situation where U.S. President Donald Trump soon after the inauguration began taking the “America First” attitude, PM Ishiba expressed his view that regards the Japan-U.S. alliance as absolute.

Tamura said that PM Ishiba proposed to realize a so-called “pleasant Japan”, but presented no vision for achieving this.

She claimed that PM Ishiba’s policy speech mirrored his reluctance to truly understand the seriousness of the ongoing cost of living crisis and explained nothing about government measures to analyze the underlying factors contributing to the 30-year-long ailing economy which has caused hardships in people’s livelihoods and to properly address this issue.

Tamura said that PM Ishiba, while using the term, “food self-sufficiency rate”, showed no sign of remorse for the LDP’s agriculture policies which abandoned the goal of increasing Japan’s food self-sufficiency rate and caused the decline in agriculture.

The JCP EC Chair noted that PM Ishiba mentioned the need to correct the gap in wages between men and women. However, she said, he failed to propose any concrete policy in this regard because he lacks the awareness that the dual-track employment system (non-career track and career track) under which women are paid less than men is a form of indirect discrimination against women.

Criticizing PM Ishiba for not exhibiting an ounce of remorse for the LDP factions’ slush-fund scandal, she stated that in this ordinary Diet session, the JCP will grill the Ishiba government about its draft budget for fiscal 2025 from the viewpoint of putting an end to the political distortions which give first priority to the interests of large corporations and are overly submissive to the Japan-U.S. alliance.