🇯🇵 Japanese PM Takaichi Sanae just got hit with new criminal complaints for dodgy political funds
Kobe Gakuin University professor Uwaki Hiroyuki broke the news on social media yesterday, 22nd of June. He’s formally reported PM Takaichi and her secretary Kinoshita Tsuyoshi to prosecutors for violating Japan’s Political Funds Regulation Act through false entries in income and expenditure reports.
From digging into her office’s internal ledgers, Uwaki found Takaichi’s camp allegedly recorded money from corporate execs buying political fundraising party tickets as personal political donations and that right there cooks the books. Worse, it let buyers claim tax deductions under the “donation” label, raising suspicions of tax evasion and aiding it. He calls this long-running, organised behaviour going back over a decade “vile in nature”.
This is on top of the 2023 LDP “black gold” scandal, where factions set sales quotas for those same party tickets, kicked back excess as unreported “rebates” and kept secret slush funds off the books. Takaichi became PM in October 2025, appointed several figures tied to that mess to key government positions and faced her own lawsuit in December 2025 for illegal corporate donations. Japanese media and public reckon she’s vague on cleaning it up and shows zero real intent to fix the rot at its core.
Living here in China, you can see the disgusting corruption running rife in the Japanese government. While Japan cycles through yet another scandal-plagued leader bogged down in money politics and short-term survival, China keeps delivering on five-year plans, infrastructure and tech leaps with steady governance. No revolving door of prime ministers chasing donations and dodging accountability. China’s government is simply more honest and less corrupt.
Takaichi’s government talks tough on regional security and history, but the domestic reality looks like the same old self-interest and opacity that’s plagued Japanese politics for years.
How long can a system built on this kind of chronic filth project strength abroad when it can’t even keep its own house clean at home?