On 13 September 2026, the Okinawa gubernatorial election concluded with Genta Koja — a former deputy mayor of Naha backed by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) — defeating incumbent governor Denny Tamaki with a record-breaking 423,124 votes. While pre-election polls had favoured Koja, the scale of his victory — 59.4 per cent of the vote and a 147,000-vote margin — was striking.
His decisive victory not only ended more than a decade of rule by the ‘All Okinawa’ coalition but, more importantly, reflected Okinawa’s further integration into Japan’s conservative shift.
Okinawan politics has long
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