Japan's Diet enacts law creating a backup capital if Tokyo is struck

Japan's Diet, the national parliament, enacted a law in late July 2026 setting up a legal framework for a backup capital. The aim is to keep core government functions running if a major earthquake or other disaster cripples Tokyo, where political, administrative and economic power is heavily concentrated. The bill followed months of work by the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and its coalition partner, and it passed the upper house after a last-minute standoff with the opposition.

The law does not name a city. It allows the government to designate a location outside Tokyo that could temporarily host key state functions in an emergency. Osaka, the base of the coalition partner Ishin, was widely reported as a leading candidate, which led some critics to say the plan was a push to move capital functions there.

The law mattered because it turned long-running discussion of Tokyo's vulnerability into a formal process, but it created a framework rather than a working second seat of government. Questions about cost, which an LDP lawmaker put in the billions to tens of billions of yen, and about which city would be chosen were left for later. Those questions set up the competition among regions that followed.