Photo/Illutration Investigators of the Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office enter an office branch of Akira Ishii, an Upper House member from Nippon Ishin (Japan Innovation Party), in Toride, Ibaraki Prefecture, on Aug. 27. (Hikaru Yokoyama)

The Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office raided the offices of Upper House member Akira Ishii on Aug. 27 as part of an investigation into allegations that he fraudulently collected the state-paid salary of one of his aides.

At around 10 a.m., investigators descended upon Ishii’s office in his hometown of Toride, Ibaraki Prefecture, as well as his office in Tokyo’s Chiyoda Ward.

Investigators began searching the premises and seizing documents as they work to uncover the full details of the suspected fraud.

Ishii, 68, a member of Nippon Ishin (Japan Innovation Party), has a long career in politics. After serving as a city assemblyman in Toride, he was first elected to the Lower House in the August 2009 election as a proportional representation candidate of the now-defunct Democratic Party of Japan. 

He then lost three subsequent national elections, but made a political comeback in the July 2016 Upper House election where he won a proportional representation seat with the party then known as Osaka Ishin no Kai.

Ishii was re-elected in July 2022 under the banner of its successor, the Japan Innovation Party.

Japanese politics has a history of scandals involving the fraudulent collection of aides’ salaries.

A wave of such cases continued until the early 2000s, including the high-profile arrest of then-Lower House member Kiyomi Tsujimoto. She is now an Upper House member of the main opposition Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan.

These cases prompted legal reforms.

The Diet would pass a revised law concerning the salaries of lawmakers' aides in 2004 that included measures to prohibit lawmakers from hiring their spouses and to ensure salaries were paid directly to the aides.

However, the problem has not disappeared.

Megumi Hirose, a former Upper House member who belonged to the ruling Liberal Democratic Party at the time, was indicted without arrest on fraud charges in August 2024. Hirose had been illegally receiving the salary of an aide with no record of actually working for her.

Hirose’s conviction in that case has since been finalized.

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