Hey! Say Ishin: Ōmae Ken’ichi’s and Hashimoto Tōru’s policy entrepreneurship and the neoliberal reorientation of contemporary Ishin politics

Abstract

This article reevaluates contemporary Ishin by comparing two policy entrepreneurs – managerialist guru Ōmae Ken’Ichi, and former Osaka governor Hashimoto Tōru. It argues that Ōmae’s and Hashimoto’s policy entrepreneurship put contemporary Ishin on a managerialist and neoliberal trajectory and fashioned it into a policymaking template for anti-establishment political reformers (kaikakuha). Despite using nationalist and anachronistic ’Ishin’ terminology with his Heisei Ishin no Kai (Heisei Restoration) political movement of the early 1990s, Ōmae adapted ideational innovation and coalition building strategies from his experience in McKinsey & Company to diffuse managerialist and neoliberal policy ideas through the broader political system. Some two decades later, Hashimoto’s Ōsaka Ishin (Osaka Restoration) politics reified many of Ōmae’s ideas and practices through a form of ‘technocratic populism’, in which a seemingly incompatible pairing of anti-establishment populism and the reliance on technical ‘experts’ underpins the governing process. Using the ‘policy entrepreneur’ analytical framework’, the first two sections of this article pinpoint the critical juncture where Ōmae inverted Ishin’s state-building logic into an anti-establishment, neoliberal platform. The final section outlines Hashimoto’s personalisation of the executive offices of local government and offers a novel look at populist governance in Japan.