Tokyo’s controversial governor re-elected

Ishihara, who has proposed setting up a bank for small companies and a casino to boost local revenue in a challenge to central government policies, brushed aside simmering speculation he might eventually seek to become prime minister.

Asked if would serve out a second four-year term, Ishihara — endorsed by the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and its coalition partner, the Buddhist-backed Komeito — said he was prepared to do so. The final count showed that Ishihara earned some 3.1 million or 70 percent of the votes against 820,000 for Keiko Higuchi, a female university professor and social critic, who was backed by the main opposition Democratic Party.

Yoshiharu Wakabayashi, 52, who heads the Tokyo chapter of the Communist Party, garnered 365,000 votes.

In campaigns for the top executive jobs in 10 prefectures and two cities, as well as seats in 44 prefectural and 12 municipal assemblies, opposition parties have blasted Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s government for its support of the U.S.-led war in Iraq.

But Koizumi’s conservative LDP, despite his failure to pull Japan out of recession, was seen likely to win nearly 1,400 of the 2,634 seats in the prefectural assemblies, according to a survey by the Kyodo news agency.

It would be the first time since 1991 that the LDP would win more than half the seats in the assemblies, since it failed to do so in the 1995 and 1999 local elections, Kyodo said.

Ishihara gave up his parliamentary seat as an LDP deputy in 1995 and overwhelmingly won the governorship in a 19-way race in 1999 without relying on support from any big political party.

He has agitated Washington by demanding the joint use of a sprawling US airbase in Tokyo’s suburbs by Japanese commercial airliners, while his support for Taiwan and rebels in Tibet has angered China’s leadership.

Ishihara, who won the country’s most prestigious literary award, Akutagawa Prize, in his youth, has been at the center of political storms as he sought a greater say for his city in national administration.

As Tokyo’s chief, he has proposed an additional local tax on major banks and another on the entry of air-polluting diesel-powered vehicles into the capital.

Ishihara, has called for changes to Japan’s war-renouncing constitution and has also publicly said Japan should go to war against North Korea to settle the score over abductions of Japanese nationals by North Korean agents in Cold War years.

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