The results of the 2025 Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly election caught me by surprise. Among the most startling outcomes was the complete defeat of “Path to Rebirth” (Saisei no Michi), a newly formed political group led by Shinji Ishimaru. Despite fielding highly capable and reform-driven candidates, the group failed to secure even a single seat. For a movement that had captured the imagination of many reform-minded citizens, the result felt disorienting.
The disappointment is not merely electoral. It raises deeper questions about how politics works in real communities, and why messages of reform, even when logical and well-articulated, often struggle to take root in places where loyalty and lived experience matter more than resumes or televised debate performances. It also shines a light on the fundamental differences between national charisma and local trust.
If anything, the story of Path to Rebirth is a case study in what happens when elite-driven meritocratic politics tries to walk into the dense thickets of local life without first learning its language.
The Promise of Path to Rebirth
Path to Rebirth was not just another fringe movement. It was founded by Shinji Ishimaru, the outspoken and reformist former mayor of Akitakata City. Known for his uncompromising stance on transparency and administrative accountability, Ishimaru had built a reputation that reached well beyond his rural hometown. His online broadcasts of city council meetings, where he often confronted bureaucratic inertia head-on, earned him a national following.
His national visibility further skyrocketed during the 2024 Tokyo gubernatorial election, where he ran as an independent challenger to the incumbent. While he did not win, his campaign drew widespread attention, bringing his reformist ideals to a much larger audience. That experience solidified his position as a polarizing yet prominent figure in Japanese politics; someone seen by many as a principled outsider willing to challenge entrenched systems.
Building on that visibility, he launched Path to Rebirth with a promise to renew Japanese democracy, starting from Tokyo. The party emphasized the need to restore the two-chamber system’s balance, curb executive overreach, and reinvigorate local assemblies as centers of honest debate and decision-making.
The candidates were striking in their diversity and competence. Many came from professional backgrounds: lawyers, civil servants, academics, and entrepreneurs. Their campaign materials highlighted thoughtful policy positions, civic-minded ideals, and a shared frustration with how stagnant and theatrical local politics had become. In a landscape often filled with vague slogans, their specificity stood out.
Local Politics and the Power of Embedded Networks
Yet, even before ballots were cast, quiet doubts lingered. Local politics, especially in a city as complex as Tokyo, is not only about policy. It is deeply social. For decades, traditional parties like the Liberal Democratic Party, Komeito, and in more recent years, Tomin First no Kai, have cultivated relationships with neighborhood associations, school boards, small business owners, construction groups, and religious communities. These connections form what are often referred to as “organized votes.”
Organized votes are not transactional in the cynical sense. They are woven into the history of community life. A local politician may help expedite permits for a shrine festival, or speak at a PTA meeting, or provide assistance during a neighborhood dispute. These interactions create trust and presence. When elections come around, people remember not the speeches and debates on YouTube, but the politician who helped their grandmother get a city grant.
In this context, even the most intelligent and well-intentioned outsider faces an uphill battle. Without these pre-existing ties, Path to Rebirth candidates were seen by many as unfamiliar figures, arriving with polished ideas but little shared history.
The Limits of Meritocracy in Community Politics
The candidates of Path to Rebirth embodied what some would call meritocratic ideals. They were qualified, well-spoken, and often deeply knowledgeable about policy. But this raised a quiet paradox. In communities where leadership is less about credentials and more about relationships, their competence could feel distant, even alien.
Michael Sandel, the political philosopher, has warned against the unintended consequences of meritocratic systems. When success is attributed solely to talent and effort, those who do not succeed may feel humiliated or ignored. In politics, this becomes a subtle form of exclusion. Candidates who speak the language of reform may seem to imply that those who came before were unfit. That message, however unintentional, can backfire.
In the Tokyo election, many voters likely evaluated candidates not by their degrees or work history, but by how close they felt. Did they know them? Had they seen them in the neighborhood? Would they answer a call from a local resident? Merit in politics is not measured by expertise alone, but by emotional presence.
Community Leadership and the Comfort of the Known
The dynamics of community leadership are particularly visible in places where formal infrastructure is weak. In squatter settlements, slums, and impoverished neighborhoods around the world, leadership does not emerge through elections or degrees. It emerges through shared survival.
In such places, people support each other not because of grand visions but because of necessity. A neighbor helps care for a sick child. Someone offers a loan during a family emergency. These gestures create a bond stronger than any speech. Leadership in these contexts is informal, but it is real, and deeply trusted.
What is true in slums is, in another form, also true in Tokyo neighborhoods. The person who can mobilize votes is often the one who shows up at funerals, mediates disputes, or delivers seasonal gifts. Reformist candidates, no matter how sincere, cannot replicate that presence in a few months of campaigning. And when they speak of the need to act now to prevent long-term decline, many voters remain unmoved. Their concerns are not twenty years ahead. Their concerns are today and tomorrow.
Reform Without Belonging: The Misalignment
Path to Rebirth offered solutions. But in doing so, it revealed a deeper misalignment between policy logic and community trust. The group underestimated how much of politics is about familiarity. Voters want to be represented not just by those who are smart, but by those who understand them, not in the abstract, but in lived detail.
The candidates’ distance from their electoral districts was not merely geographic. It was emotional. They spoke with clarity and integrity, but they were not perceived as part of the daily life of the community. They were not the uncle who fixes the park bench, or the auntie who organizes summer festivals.
This is not a call to abandon reform. Rather, it is a reminder that reform must be embedded. It must grow roots, and those roots cannot be hurried. Political transformation must begin with presence, not just vision. And presence is not achieved through policy papers or viral videos; it is achieved through time.
What Can Be Learned and Built from This?
If there is a silver lining in Path to Rebirth’s failure, it is the clarity it offers. The defeat was not meaningless. It showed exactly where the foundations were weak: in human relationships, in emotional belonging, in local trust.
For reformist politics to grow, it must become less seasonal. Candidates cannot arrive six months before an election and expect to be embraced. They must spend years listening, participating, helping, not as campaigners, but as neighbors. This means joining festivals, attending community cleanups, visiting care homes, and learning the daily rhythms of the places they hope to serve.
Reform should not be abandoned. But it must evolve. It must learn to speak not only in systems, but in stories. Not only in urgency, but in presence. The path to political renewal is not paved with arguments alone. It is paved with trust.
A New Kind of Political Maturity
The 2025 Tokyo election may be remembered as a painful moment for those who believed in change. But it also marks a turning point; a lesson in what reform must become if it wishes to succeed.
Politics is not a contest of ideas alone. It is a contest of belonging. And in that contest, the village, the metaphorical and literal one, still holds enormous sway. If reform movements want to win, they must move in, not just pass through. They must become part of the community they seek to change.
Perhaps Path to Rebirth, in losing, has found the beginning of something wiser. Not the end of a vision, but the start of its grounding. If they are willing to stay, listen, and grow roots, the next chapter may yet be theirs to write.
Image by Sofia Terzoni
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