Masahiro Ishii

Masahiro Ishii ( Japanese 石井 正弘 , Ishii Masahiro ; born November 29, 1945 in Okayama , Okayama Prefecture ) is a Japanese politician of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and has been a member of the Upper House for Okayama since 2013 . He was the governor of Okayama from 1996 to 2012.

Ishii graduated from the Tokyo University Faculty of Law in 1969 and then became a civil servant in the Ministry of Construction . In 1996 he ended his civil service career and turned to politics when Governor Shirō Nagano retired from office after 24 years in his home prefecture Okayama .

In the October 1996 gubernatorial election, Ishii had the support of the Liberal Democratic Party . The main opposing candidate was the NFP-supported former national MP Satsuki Eda , a communist and the nationalist independent Kiyoshi Tsujiyama, who later ran as a "permanent candidate" in numerous prefectural and local elections, ran. With a relatively high turnout of 62 percent, Ishii received not quite 6,000 votes (0.6% share) more than his competitor Eda. Since then, he has been re-elected three times, with broad support from the major parties, each against just one CPY-supported challenger. He withdrew for the 2012 gubernatorial election , and Ryūta Ibaragi was elected as his successor .

In the upper house election 2013 Ishii ran in Okayama (one mandate per election) for the LDP with Kōmeitō support. With 65.5% of the vote, he clearly prevailed against the former MP Takashi Takai (independent with the support of DPJ , SDP and Midori no Kaze ), who received 24.1% of the vote, and two other candidates. In 2019 he was re-elected with almost 60% of the vote.

Web links

• Website (japanese)
• Sangiin: Member Profile (Japanese, English )

Individual evidence

1. ↑ 2013 参 院 選> 開票 速 報> 選 挙 区 開票 速 報 ： 岡山 （改選 数 1） . In: Asahi Shimbun Digital. July 2013, accessed August 12, 2019 (Japanese).