benches before returning

Initially a member of the agriculture ‘zoku’ (‘tribe’, used to refer to members of the Diet interested in particular policy domains), Ishiba quickly developed an interest in foreign policy and defence issues after the 1990 Gulf War. As one of the prominent defectors from the LDP in 1993, he spent the next three years in the opposition benches before returning to the party in 1997 Ishiba’s real debut at the high table of Japanese politics was in 2000, when he became deputy director-general of the then-Japanese Defence Agency (JDA) under Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori ufabet