There aren't a huge number of Japanese friends that I'm sufficiently close to for them to broach what they might assume is a sensitive or embarrassing topic to me. That's a huge social faux pas in Japan; you need to be "best friend" close or nearly so, or family. If a Japanese person any less close to me than that is concerned about where the US is going or full-on critical of that direction, that's not a conversation they'd have with me. I wouldn't bring up Japanese politics with them, either (for all that I do in fact have some fairly strong opinions on that subject).

The handful that are that close? Honestly, it hasn't come up enough for me to be certain (I don't talk/think about politics as much as most Americans seem to...), but as you might expect, the sort of person I get closer to has pretty progressive viewpoints and they're not fans of the current US administration. There are, however, plenty of people in Japan who think well of Trump: he's like some of the more strident, populist/nationalist right-wingers in Japanese politics (more on that below), and since they're probably not very familiar with how scummy he is personally, they have a good opinion of the guy. But even those rightists are very unhappy with the Trump administration's flailing trade policies and their obvious negative effect on the struggling Japanese economy.

I'd posit that the average educated Japanese person views Trump as at least something of an out-of-his-depth buffoon...but they also tend to view their own politicians much the same way. It's a powerful but largely disrespected profession.

Prime Minister Ishiba announced his resignation today, and it's pretty wide open who his successor will be. There is some possibility they won't come from the current ruling party (LDP), but that's a pretty remote chance. LDP doesn't have an outright majority in the Diet now, but they will almost certainly put together enough of a coalition to ensure their choice will be the next PM.

And that's a problem. The rightist LDP's three leading candidates are: the probable winner (Hayashi) who is basically the usual "safe" party apparatchik, a young scion of a traditionally powerful political family (Koizumi), and a frankly rather frightening nationalist (Takaichi). Hayashi is just what I said: a completely typical LDP guy in his 60's with a well-filled-out portfolio that departs in no meaningful way from business as usual. Given the LDP's successive loss of seats in the Diet and regional government positions, choosing him risks failing to arrest that decline and eventually losing control of the government.

Koizumi at first seems ideal. He's young at 44, good-looking, and superbly connected. But his experience in office is somewhat glaringly not in any economic/finance role. If he screwed things up as PM in an already shaky Japanese economy, it could destroy the LDP in the next nationwide election.

That leaves Sanae Takaichi, who just barely lost out to Ishiba in the last LDP decision on PM. She'd be the first female in the role in Japanese history...but she's a hardcore nationalist right-winger. Favors officially removing the pacifistic elements of the Japanese constitution (instead of rationalizing their way around them as is the current practice), visits a shrine associated with Japanese WW2 war dead (fine, mostly, but the particular one she favors has multiple war criminals remains), etc. She's basically Shinzo Abe without a Y chromosome (and alive).

Interesting times...