Behold Japan's Taro Aso: a man who built his fortune...

Editor's note: ...the old-fashioned way: by being born into it. His great-grandfather dug coal out of Kyushu with actual forced labor, his father poured that into a cement empire, and Taro himself dutifully warmed the CEO's chair for six years before deciding the family business was beneath him and politics was the better stage. Today he's sitting on an estimated $5 billion, 80% of it inherited, spread across a 60-company empire that somehow includes a golf course. He's also one of Japan's rare devout Roman Catholics, which apparently hasn't stopped him from being remarkably comfortable with dynasty, hierarchy, and inherited privilege of a more earthly kind. Truly, a self-made man, if by "self-made" you mean "made by his great-grandfather in 1872." We finally have some clarity on what Taro Aso's involvement in Japan's imperial succession debate is really about. His sister is married into the imperial family, and he now chairs the very government council rewriting the rules of succession, rules that, as currently drafted, happen to open a door for the branch of the family his sister married into. That is not proof of a plot. It is, at minimum, a glaring conflict of interest that would end most political careers elsewhere. Aso is a textbook case of wealth and dynastic connection insulating a man from consequences that would sink anyone else. Whether the Japanese public accepts that quietly is now the real question. 

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Treason in Japan's Imperial Family

July 9, 2026 | Japan Media Review

If you follow Japanese news, you already know one of the hottest stories right now: the government's attempt to revise the laws governing the imperial family. At the core of the debate is succession. Who should be the next Emperor? The public is largely divided between those who want Princess Aiko to take the throne and a smaller, hardcore conservative faction pushing for male-only succession.

Amid this debate, a conspiracy to reshape the succession is quietly taking shape. The figure at the center of it is former Prime Minister Aso Taro, known in Japan as "the Don of the political world" (政界のドン). The nickname reflects his reputation for wielding power from the shadows, in a style critics have compared to that of a political boss.

Aso currently holds two major roles in Japanese politics. He is an elected member of the Lower House representing Fukuoka's 8th district, and he is Vice President of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), the second-most powerful post in the party after President Takaichi.

Aso is widely reported to have played a decisive behind-the-scenes role in Takaichi's rise to the LDP presidency. After her election, she named him Vice President. As part of the same arrangement, she also made Aso's brother-in-law, Suzuki, the party's Secretary-General, further consolidating the Aso family's influence. The three most powerful figures in the LDP today are President Takaichi, Vice President Aso, and Secretary-General Suzuki, Aso's brother-in-law. (These are internal party posts, held in addition to their public government positions.)

The relationship among the three is not straightforward. Aso and Suzuki are family and core members of the Aso faction. Takaichi is often aligned with that faction but works to preserve some independence from it. Despite this tension, all three are reportedly united in pushing for male-only imperial succession. For Takaichi, a longtime hardline conservative, this fulfills promises made to her base. Aso's motives appear more complicated.

Aso is related to the imperial family through his sister, Nobuko, who is married to Prince Tomohito of Mikasa. Critics argue that by reshaping succession law, Aso could open a path for a male heir connected to his own family to eventually reach the throne. The Aso family has been wealthy and politically influential since the Meiji era, and if his sister's descendants became eligible for the succession, the family would, for the first time, produce an emperor. For that to happen, the claim currently held by the sitting Emperor's bloodline would need to be set aside.

Japanese media have drawn a pointed historical comparison, likening Aso to the Fujiwara clan of the Heian era, who married daughters into the imperial family and used those ties to dominate it for generations.

Aso now chairs the government committee tasked with revising the succession law, formally titled the "Council Concerning Ensuring Stable Imperial Succession" (安定的な皇位継承の確保に関する懇談会). Critics note the apparent conflict of interest: a man whose sister married into the imperial family is now leading the effort to rewrite the rules of succession. Much of the committee's work has taken place away from public scrutiny, with limited debate in the National Diet.

Reshaping succession to favor one's own family is, in the eyes of many Japanese, tantamount to usurpation, so any such effort would need to proceed carefully, gradually, and with a veneer of legitimacy. The most direct route is to rule out female succession altogether. Because the current Emperor has no son, a male-only succession law would end his bloodline's claim outright. Under former Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro, the government had seriously explored allowing female succession. Under the current LDP leadership, that possibility appears to be receding.

Rather than proposing changes to the succession line directly, Aso's committee has instead focused on a more modest-sounding goal: expanding the shrinking imperial family, which is losing members as women leave upon marriage and few sons are born. The committee has proposed allowing four princely branches to adopt sons from distant relatives who lost imperial status generations ago. Aso's sister, who has no son of her own, is married into one of those four branches, meaning the proposal would allow her to adopt an heir.

The LDP has stated that these adopted sons themselves would not be eligible for the throne, since they would come from families now legally classified as civilians. What the proposal does not explicitly address is the status of any sons born to those adopted sons; as children born within the imperial family, they would not be civilians and could become eligible to succeed. The committee has not written this into its formal proposal, for two apparent reasons: Aso appears intent on moving slowly rather than confronting the succession question head-on, and recent polling shows most Japanese oppose the idea of an adopted son's child ascending to the throne.

Combined with polling showing broad public support for allowing a female emperor, the picture is fairly clear: most Japanese would prefer to see the current Emperor's daughter succeed him, not the descendant of an adopted son connected to the Aso family. That gap between public opinion and the committee's direction appears to be precisely why the process is unfolding so slowly and so quietly.

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The Japanese people would overwhelmingly support Princess Aiko:  

All connects back to Taro Aso:

Why Takaichi unexpectedly became Japan's new Prime Minister

What the Japanese media is saying about Takaichi's government

Update on Takaichi's new government


Editor's note: Taro Aso's family fortune traces back to his great-grandfather, Takichi Aso, who founded the Aso Mining Company in Kyushu and built it into one of the region's major coal operations. During World War II, the company relied heavily on forced labor, using an estimated 10,000 or more Korean conscripts between 1939 and 1945, who worked under brutal conditions for little pay, with historians documenting that Aso Mining's treatment of workers was among the harshest of the coal companies in the Fukuoka region at the time; a 1936 mine fire alone killed 29 workers, 25 of them Korean. The company also forced roughly 300 Allied prisoners of war, including 197 Australians, 101 British, and two Dutch, to work in its Yoshikuma coal mine in 1945 without pay, and two of the Australian POWs died there. 

Taro Aso, whose immediate family has continued to own and run the company (now called the Aso Group), spent years denying or refusing to confirm this history, only conceding in 2008 and 2009, after mounting evidence from Japanese government records and former POWs, that his family's mine had indeed used forced labor. Even after that admission, neither Asō nor the company has issued a formal apology or compensation to surviving Korean or Allied victims, and Aso has been associated with efforts by close aides to downplay or dispute the scale of the Korean forced labor in particular. Taro Aso has made a grudging, incomplete admission over 15 years ago regarding POWs specifically, but has never apologized to either group, and has continued to avoid engaging with the Korean labor conscription part of his family's history right up to the present, as far as public record shows.