Jiro Ono

Jiro Ono was born on 7 August 1953 in Itabashi, Tokyo. His family's registered domicile was Akeno in what is now Hokuto, Yamanashi Prefecture, and he later explained that his father's side of the family came from Yamanashi, which is why he chose to stand there in 2005.

Because of his parents' job transfers he moved to Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture, as a child. He entered Sendai Municipal Kunimi Elementary School, graduated from Sendai Municipal Kimachidori Elementary School and attended the junior high school attached to Miyagi University of Education. In 1968 the family moved back to the Tokyo area, and in 1969 he graduated from Hoya Municipal Seiran Junior High School (now in Nishitokyo).

Ono graduated in 1972 from the high school attached to Tokyo Kyoiku University at Komaba, today the Junior and Senior High School at Komaba, University of Tsukuba. He then studied at the Faculty of Law of the University of Tokyo, graduating in 1976.

In 1979, as a long-term overseas researcher of Japan's National Personnel Authority, he went to France and studied at the University of Angers in the Loire region. He received a master's degree in law in 1981. He later joked that his thesis, on the taxi licensing system in France, surprised every French taxi driver he told about it.

Ono joined the National Police Agency in 1976. He said he had been considering other ministries until he met Kuniyasu Tsuchida, the Superintendent General of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police whose wife had been killed by a bomb, and was so moved by him that he rewrote his civil service application to list only the police.

At 28 he became head of the second criminal investigation division of the Ibaraki Prefectural Police, the section responsible for corruption, corporate crime and election violations. From 1986 he was seconded to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as a first secretary at the Japanese Embassy in France, leading the embassy's analysis of French domestic politics during the cohabitation between President Mitterrand and Prime Minister Chirac. He returned to Japan in 1989 and was made an Officer of France's National Order of Merit.

He went on to serve as head of the education division and then of the crime prevention general affairs division of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department (from 1989), director of general affairs of the Hokkaido Prefectural Police (1991), head of the National Police Agency's firearms countermeasures office and division (1993), director of its second international affairs division (1995), chief of the Kagoshima Prefectural Police (1998), a post he called one of the most admired in Japanese policing, and director of the agency's first organised crime countermeasures division (2000).

When Junichiro Koizumi formed his cabinet in April 2001, Ono became one of the prime minister's executive secretaries, the official seconded from the National Police Agency. He held the post for about four years and four months, a period that included the 11 September 2001 attacks, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the suspicious ship incident off Amami and developments on the issue of Japanese citizens abducted by North Korea. Ono later said he had written about 2,000 answers for the prime minister to deliver in the Diet.

He described Koizumi as a natural crisis manager and recalled the prime minister telling him that he, Ono, should decide whether news was serious enough to wake him at night, and that the time Ono received a report would count as the time the prime minister received it.

In August 2005 Koizumi dissolved the House of Representatives over postal privatisation. Ono offered to stand in Yamanashi, where the sitting LDP members had rebelled. He recalled that Koizumi first advised him against it because he would lose his place in the bureaucracy, then accepted when Ono said he could not watch the reforms he had drafted answers for be derailed. Ono lost Yamanashi's 3rd district in the September 2005 election but was elected through the Southern Kanto proportional block. He became an organiser of the LDP's new members, including the 83 Kai group, and founded a group of first-term members unaffiliated with any faction.

In June 2008 he led a group of young legislators against wasteful spending that issued ten proposals for administrative and fiscal reform, including abolishing special accounts. In March 2009 he left the chamber and abstained when the lower house re-passed legislation for the cash handout programme, saying it lacked public support. He lost his seat in the August 2009 general election.

In January 2010 he left the LDP and joined Your Party at the request of its leader, Yoshimi Watanabe. He was elected to the House of Councillors from the national proportional list in July 2010. From 2011 he was the lead sponsor of a series of bills, among them proposals on political leadership over the bureaucracy, reconstruction after the Great East Japan Earthquake, a citizens' audit law, child safety on school routes, extending crime victim benefits to Japanese harmed abroad, and opposition alternatives to the 2015 security legislation.

In December 2013 he left Your Party with Kenji Eda and became the first secretary-general of the Unity Party (Yui no To). When it merged into the Japan Innovation Party (Ishin no To) in September 2014 he headed the party's abduction issue headquarters and its security research council, became chair of its general council in September 2015, ran unsuccessfully for party leader against Yorihisa Matsuno in December 2015 and then served as chair of its policy research council.

After the party merged into the Democratic Party (Minshinto) in March 2016, Diet rules on proportional members kept Ono from joining formally, but he was named a party vice president while remaining an independent. He lost re-election in July 2016 with 46,213 personal votes and gave up the post that September. In October 2021 he stood as a list-only candidate for the Constitutional Democratic Party in Southern Kanto, ranked 29th, and was not elected.

Ono was married to Toshiko Ono, who is named as chief mourner at his funeral. Details of any children have not been made public.

Outside politics he chaired the Japan Corporate Crisis Management Association, was a director of the Sawada Management Dojo public interest foundation and served as vice chair of the Human and Animal Rights Organization. In his last years he appeared live once a month on the internet programme Democra TV's Honkaigi, and he posted on X about politics and everyday life, including Tokyo food and kindness from strangers on the train.

Ono described himself on X as reform-minded but against war, and listed animal welfare and building Japan on renewable energy among his causes. He argued that the pre-war Home Ministry tradition from which the police descended was pragmatic rather than ideological, and that Japanese politics needed a party that neither simply sided with the government nor simply opposed it, but offered counterproposals.

In a 2010 candidate survey he said he supported free public high school tuition, a regional state system, legislators visiting Yasukuni Shrine and cutting the number of Diet seats, and opposed raising corporate tax, voting rights for foreign residents and abolishing the death penalty. In a May 2015 representative question in the House of Councillors he said the government's security bills raised suspicion of a military alliance with no brakes. In November 2025 he wrote that Japan does not start wars with any country and that its self-defence capability exists solely to defend itself.

Ono belonged to a line of former Home Ministry and police officials who moved into politics. His years in the Koizumi prime minister's office placed him at the centre of crisis management during an unusually long-lived government, and his later moves through Your Party, the Unity Party, the Japan Innovation Party and the Democratic Party made him a figure in the reshaping of Japan's opposition in the 2010s. When his death was reported, commentators noted that it was announced on the same day as that of former Chief Cabinet Secretary and Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, alongside whom he had served in the Koizumi government.

Officer of the National Order of Merit (France), 1989.

Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Rosette (Japan), 2023.

Ono wrote the book Furenchi Rosuto no Kaoru Toki (When French Roast Is in the Air), published by Tachibana Shobo in 1991. The writer Eiji Oshita wrote Kantei no Shinso: Sori Hishokan Ono Jiro (Deep Inside the Prime Minister's Office: Prime Ministerial Secretary Jiro Ono), issued in a revised non-commercial edition in 2012. Many of his press conferences as a Japan Innovation Party official and his Diet questioning are archived on YouTube, and he gave a long interview on security policy to Iwakami Yasumi of IWJ in July 2015.

Isao Iijima, Koizumi's long-time political secretary, later wrote critically of Ono's time in the prime minister's office. According to Iijima, Ono leaked a draft prime ministerial statement planned for after Koizumi's August 2001 Yasukuni Shrine visit to someone likely to pass it to the Foreign Ministry, and could not be reached on the night of the 11 September 2001 attacks. Iijima also said Ono was the only administrative secretary replaced during the Koizumi government. Ono responded that he should not speak lightly about his work before entering politics and would accept criticism humbly.

In December 2018, during the dispute over a South Korean destroyer directing fire control radar at a Japanese P-1 patrol aircraft, Ono drew attention by criticising the Japanese crew for approaching a warship engaged in operations.

Jiro Ono died at 5:31 a.m. on 23 October 2026 at a hospital in Kodaira, Tokyo, from aspiration pneumonia. He was 73. His death was reported by Jiji Press, the Sankei Shimbun, the Nikkei and the Tokyo Shimbun on 26 October 2026. The funeral and farewell ceremony are scheduled for 10:30 a.m. on 31 October 2026 at the Yoyohata Saijo hall in Nishihara, Shibuya, Tokyo, with his wife, Toshiko, serving as chief mourner. His last posts on X date from December 2025.