Takeaki Matsumoto

Takeaki Matsumoto was born in Tokyo on 25 April 1959. His father, Juro Matsumoto, was a Liberal Democratic Party member of the House of Representatives from the old Hyogo 4th district who served as Director General of the Defense Agency in the first Kaifu cabinet (1989 to 1990). His mother, Etsuko, was descended from Ito Hirobumi, the first Prime Minister of Japan: Ito's daughter Asako married the diplomat Genshiro Nishi, and their daughter Seiko married the diplomat Keinosuke Fujii, Etsuko's parents. That made Ito Takeaki Matsumoto's great-great-grandfather. Several of his uncles were diplomats, among them Banri Fujisaki, who later sat on the Supreme Court, and his cousin Ichiro Fujisaki became Japan's ambassador to the United States.

Matsumoto attended Musashi High School, a private school in Tokyo, and graduated from the Faculty of Law at the University of Tokyo in 1982, taking the public law course. His wife was a University of Tokyo classmate.

After graduating in 1982 Matsumoto joined the Industrial Bank of Japan. In August 1989 he left the bank to become secretary to his father, newly appointed Director General of the Defense Agency. Juro Matsumoto lost his seat in 1993. In 1996 Takeaki ran in the new Hyogo 11th district (Himeji) as an independent and his father's successor, finishing fourth in a five candidate race won by Toru Toida of the LDP.

Running for the Democratic Party of Japan, Matsumoto won Hyogo 11th in 2000 and again in 2003. He served as defence spokesman in the DPJ shadow cabinet and was regarded as one of the party's foreign and security policy specialists. In 2005 he lost the district but returned through the Kinki proportional block, and the new party leader Seiji Maehara made him chair of the Policy Research Committee, a post he held until August 2007. After the DPJ came to power in 2009 he chaired the House Committee on Rules and Administration. In September 2010 he became Senior Vice Minister for Foreign Affairs. After his term as foreign minister he served as deputy Diet affairs chief, acting policy chief and head of the party's tax research commission. In September 2011 the party secretary general suspended him and two other Diet affairs officials for a month after they tendered resignations in a dispute over extending the Diet session. In December 2013 he walked out rather than vote for the party's no confidence motion against the Abe cabinet.

On 9 March 2011 Prime Minister Naoto Kan promoted Matsumoto to Minister for Foreign Affairs after Seiji Maehara resigned. Two days later the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami struck, followed by the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. Matsumoto championed 'reconstruction diplomacy', using foreign policy to support recovery in the stricken region, attract investment and tourism, and fight what Japan saw as harmful rumours about its food. He ate Fukushima produce in the ministry cafeteria and pressed Brazilian foreign minister Antonio Patriota to base import rules on science. He held talks with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in March and April 2011 and travelled abroad to thank countries for their help. He also clashed with South Korea over Japanese textbooks describing Takeshima (Dokdo) as Japanese territory, at first declining to meet the South Korean ambassador and then rejecting his protest. He opened official foreign ministry Facebook and Twitter accounts in Japanese and English. His term ended on 2 September 2011 when Yoshihiko Noda formed a new cabinet.

In October 2015 Matsumoto announced he was leaving the DPJ, saying it had turned to a thoroughgoing opposition line and criticising its stance on the security legislation and its cooperation with the Communist Party. The party accepted his resignation on 10 November 2015. He joined the LDP parliamentary group in September 2016 and the party in September 2017, then joined the Aso faction (Shikokai). He won Hyogo 11th as an LDP candidate in 2017, served as acting chair of the LDP Policy Research Council from 2018, chaired the House Committee on Foreign Affairs from October 2019 and won again in 2021 and 2024. Prime Minister Fumio Kishida appointed him Minister for Internal Affairs and Communications on 21 November 2022, replacing Minoru Terada, and again on 14 December 2023, replacing Junji Suzuki. Each of his three cabinet appointments came as a replacement for a minister who had resigned. He worked on expanding the My Number card and left the cabinet on 1 October 2024.

Matsumoto was married to Takako, the eldest daughter of Kanagawa prefectural assembly member Teruji Yoshihama and his classmate at the University of Tokyo. She was chief mourner at his funeral, and he had named her as his preferred successor in Hyogo 11th, although the LDP chose Himeji deputy mayor Motoyasu Yamada instead. His younger sister Reiko worked at the Ministry of Finance. Whether he had children has not been made public. Although born in Tokyo, he made his home in Himeji, Hyogo Prefecture. He was a smoker and belonged to a cross party caucus of smoking lawmakers, and he was a vice chair of parliamentary groups promoting scouting, maritime affairs, and culture and the arts.

Matsumoto was a security hawk on both sides of the aisle. In 2021 candidate surveys he supported constitutional revision, including writing the Self-Defense Forces and collective self-defence into the constitution and adding an emergency clause, backed relocating the Futenma air base to Henoko, and favoured pressure over dialogue with North Korea. He held that Japan did not need nuclear weapons. He was broadly supportive of optional separate surnames for married couples and of an LGBT understanding law, and undecided on same sex marriage. Earlier, with Keiichiro Asao, Goshi Hosono and others, he co-proposed a plan to accept ten million immigrants to counter Japan's demographic decline.

In 2004 he was among politicians found to have missed pension contributions, in his case one month. Days after becoming internal affairs minister in November 2022, the Communist Party newspaper Shimbun Akahata reported that his support group had sold fundraising party tickets well beyond the capacity of the venues between 2018 and 2021, raising questions under the Political Funds Control Act. He acknowledged that some buyers had not attended. The same week television footage appeared to show him dozing in the upper house; he denied it, saying his eyes were narrow and that he narrowed them when thinking, before apologising when pressed. In December 2023, as the minister responsible for political funds law, he was criticised for speaking at a fundraising party for an Abe faction lawmaker days after prosecutors raided the faction.

Matsumoto is remembered as a rare figure who held cabinet office under both the Democratic Party of Japan and the Liberal Democratic Party, and as the foreign minister who represented Japan to the world during the 2011 triple disaster. International historian Yuichi Hosoya called him one of the leading policy experts and intellectuals in Japanese politics. Fellow minister Yoshimasa Hayashi described him as a comrade.

On 25 August 2026 the Japanese government posthumously conferred on Matsumoto the court rank of Senior Third Rank and the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun, effective from the date of his death.

Matsumoto's health declined in his final term; he used a wheelchair during the prime ministerial election vote on 21 October 2025. In January 2026 he decided not to stand in the 8 February general election for health reasons. He was being treated in Tokyo for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). On 19 April 2026 his support associations in Himeji held a final meeting and announced they would close his local office; unable to attend, he addressed them through an AI voice generated from his own. He died at a hospital in Tokyo at 3:45 pm on 27 July 2026, aged 67. His office announced the death on 30 July. A wake was held on 6 August and the funeral on 7 August 2026 at Kosetsuden hall, Zojoji Temple, Shiba Park, Tokyo, attended by about 400 people including Taro Aso. A farewell gathering in Hyogo was planned for a later date.