The expected joyous celebration for Nobuchiyo Kishi turned out to be more of a collective sigh of relief.

After news broke that Kishi, 31, was the projected winner of the Lower House by-election for Yamaguchi Prefecture’s No. 2 district, he stood at the front of a packed hotel ballroom in Iwakuni in the prefecture.

“With all my strength, I will commit to the challenges that this nation and this prefecture are facing,” Kishi said in his victory speech on the evening of April 23.

The chair of the Yamaguchi prefectural assembly then proposed a “three banzai cheer.”

The chair then congratulated Kishi and accidentally called him by his father’s name: “Nobuo Kishi wins the Lower House seat!”

The slip of the tongue symbolized an issue that both helped and hurt Kishi’s candidacy.

Kishi’s father, a former defense minister and a younger brother of slain former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, stepped down from the Lower House because of his illness, creating the need for the by-election.

Asked by reporters about the reason for his victory, Kishi said, “It is with the aid of everybody who has supported my father and will continue to support me.”

But it was a much tighter race than Kishi and his supporters initially expected.

Kishi won 61,369 votes, or 52.47 percent of the total, defeating Hideo Hiraoka, 69, who collected 55,601 ballots.

Even before the campaign started, the issue of Kishi’s “hereditary politics” was raised among the public.

The Kishi camp initially dismissed such talk, apparently believing name value alone would carry the candidate to the Diet.

But on April 22, Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi rushed to Iwakuni to give a campaign speech at a rally for Kishi.

“I heard there has been an improbable development,” Hayashi said in the speech.

Hayashi said that Hiroshi Moriyama, the Liberal Democratic Party’s campaign manager, called him on April 19, the day after the Group of Seven foreign ministers’ meeting wrapped up, and asked him to bolster support for Kishi.

“We cannot let our guard down just yet,” Hayashi said. “We don’t know who will win.”

Hiraoka was not a fly-by-night candidate.

He had earlier won a seat in the No. 2 district and served as justice minister in the administration of the Democratic Party of Japan headed by Yoshihiko Noda.

But in 2012 and 2014, Nobuo Kishi trounced Hiraoka in back-to-back elections.

Hiraoka retired from politics and started working as a lawyer in Tokyo.

Kishi’s campaign staffers initially viewed Hiraoka as nothing but a “has-been.”

“I thought a zombie was coming and that (Kishi’s victory) was now a surefire thing,” one staff member said after learning about Hiraoka’s candidacy.

But Kishi-to-Kishi hereditary politics ruffled more than a few feathers.

“They made a wrong start,” a person related to the LDP’s Yamaguchi prefectural chapter said.

Nobuo Kishi expressed his intention to retire at a meeting of his supporters in December. As chairman of the LDP’s Yamaguchi prefectural chapter at the time, he also said he wanted to informally bring in his oldest son, an aide at the time, as the next Lower House member.

Local politicians of opposition parties criticized Nobuo’s remarks, saying he assumed he could just transfer his Lower House seat to his son without a formal intraparty process.

The source related to the prefectural chapter said Nobuo appeared to be in a hurry to mention his son’s name, making Kishi’s candidacy look like a fixed race.

Kishi himself caused a stir by uploading his family tree on his website. It was removed after it sparked criticism from the public.

His campaign staffers said they did not realize the extent of voter opposition to hereditary politics until after the campaign officially started.

“One person who was expected to support (Kishi) at any cost told me that ‘Kishi-san is a trust-fund baby,’” a city assembly member in the district said.

The issue “delivered us a body blow,” the member said.

The realization that voters might reject such “entitlement” led to an inconsistent approach in the Kishi campaign.

Kishi initially focused on depopulation problems and rarely mentioned his famous family members.

But Diet members who joined his campaign rallies dropped phrases that hailed Kishi’s honorable pedigree.

In Tabuse town, where Kishi’s great-grandfather Nobusuke, a former prime minister, spent his early life, the head of Kishi’s local support group said, “I believe that right there, the grave of Nobusuke-sensei showed a grin and said to you all, ‘Please help (Nobuchiyo).’”

Some campaign staff members said Kishi should not refrain from saying he comes from a long line of politicians.

Toward the end of the campaign, Kishi started talking more about his lineage.

“My father worked at full speed and was physically spent from time to time and day by day,” he said in a speech. “My uncle (Abe) who died last year did so, too.”

Hiraoka initially withheld talks about hereditary politics and instead focused on criticizing Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.

But Naoto Kan, a former prime minister who joined a rally for Hiraoka, said, “Hereditary politics is the biggest issue in dispute.”

In the closing days of the campaign, Hiraoka began highlighting the problems with hereditary politics.

“Please vote for an unfolding future, not for a family tree,” Hiraoka said.

(This article was written by Takeshi Aose and Masahiro Kakihana.)