Meet the ‘Da Vinci of Reiwa’: Mayor Shijonawate’s Rise to 5th in Tokyo Gubernatorial Elections

On September 25, there is a mayor who surprised the public by announcing that he would retire at the end of this season and publicly recruiting a successor. This is Shuhei Higashi, the mayor of Shijonawate.

Politics is said to be the least reformed area of Japanese society. The current situation, in which problems with the ruling party’s slush funds and harassment of leaders are emerging, is causing further distrust in politics, creating a vicious cycle that makes the deterioration of politics even more evident. In a context where the right future is not yet clear, there are young politicians who aim to “create a new system” for politics.

One person is Shuhei Higashi, mentioned at the beginning. After working for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Nomura Research Institute, Azuma ran for mayor of his hometown of Shijonawate at the age of 28 and was elected. As the youngest current mayor (at the time), he continued to face new challenges for local government, including not only fiscal reconstruction, but also the recruitment of deputy mayors in collaboration with a private human resources services company and the building a collaborative community development system using Ta communication apps.

The other person is Takahiro Yasuno.Forbes JAPAN, November issue “CULTURE-PRENEURS 30: Cultural entrepreneurs moving the world”Mr. Yasuno, also selected (page 59), graduated from Yutaka Matsuo’s laboratory at the University of Tokyo. After working at the Boston Consulting Group, he started a number of companies that applied and implemented LLM (Large-Scale Language Models) and even won the Newcomer Award for the science fiction novel he wrote. It truly is the “Da Vinci of Reiwa.”

In 2024 he will run in the Tokyo gubernatorial elections and come in 5th place with 150,000 votes. This is a new type of politician who is attracting attention, Taiwan’s former Digital Development Minister Audrey Tan also pays close attention to her election campaign, which aims to realize digital democracy by making full use of artificial intelligence .

Why are these two taking on the challenge of creating a new political system? We connected the Forbes JAPAN editorial team with the city of Shijonawate to hear their true intentions (Interviewer/text: Shinichiro Akaishi/journalist).

As the tide of time changes, so should politicians.

──The announcement on the 25th was a surprise. He will retire as mayor after two terms.

Shuhei Higashi (hereinafter referred to as Higashi):Actually, on September 25, I held a press conference in Tokyo and announced that I would resign as mayor of Shijonawate at the end of this season. Additionally, once I retired, I also announced that we would be recruiting candidates for the next mayor nationwide. My goal is to create a pipeline that allows new people to emerge as local leaders.

Politics is a world with high barriers to entry. It is extremely difficult to become a politician if you do not have the support of an existing political party or if you are not second or third generation. There are also hurdles in terms of funding to run and having to fight in an unusual election. I believe it is necessary to create a “system” that removes barriers to entry so that new talent can easily take up the challenge of politics.