The precise timing of Japanese prime minister Shigeru Ishiba’s resignation announcement – on a Sunday evening – took many by surprise; but the countdown to his departure arguably began just weeks after he took office. The LDP and its junior coalition partner, Komeito, lost their majority in the lower house, forcing the already embattled Ishiba to lead a minority government. For the second time in less than a year, the LDP was stripped of its majority – this time in upper house elections held in July. As the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper put it in an editorial days before the upper house poll, lawmakers had “underestimated” the strength of public anger over money in politics. And so on Sunday, the same scandal that had felled his predecessor, Kishida, also brought Ishiba’s premiership to an abrupt end.