Outspoken Toru Hashimoto may have to quit as Japan Restoration Party leader

Rumours have constantly swirled around the life of Toru Hashimoto, the colourful mayor of Osaka and the founder of the nationalist Nippon Ishin no Kai, or the Japan Restoration Party (JRP).

There were the whispers about his late father's links to Japan's notorious underworld groups; questions over why his mother subsequently changed their family name; and, more recently, raised eyebrows about the wisdom of expressing the belief that the "comfort women" who were forced to provide sex to Imperial Japan's military in the early decades of the last century were a necessity of war.

Offensive to people in countries that were invaded and colonised in the last century, as well as women in general, 43-year-old Hashimoto compounded his problems by offending the United States by suggesting their troops in Okinawa expend their energies on the local prostitutes.

Now the rumours have started again, and they are getting stronger. If they are to be believed, Hashimoto is growing tired of the criticisms that he has had to put up with and is equally aware that remaining as head of the JRP could fatally damage its chances in the Upper House elections scheduled for July.

The signs are that Hashimoto will step down before the election to give his successor a better shot at becoming the third force in national politics that he envisaged when he set up the party in September. The rumours have not been scotched by Hashimoto's victory in the Osaka assembly on Thursday evening, when two motions condemning his comments justifying "comfort women" and on US forces in Okinawa were defeated in a vote.

Once Hashimoto has gone, so the stories go, he will go back to being a lawyer at his Osaka legal practice and being provocative and controversial on television chat shows. That is from where his meteoric rise to mayor of Osaka and head of a national political party all began.