Dauphins at the Gate (or the genetics of Japanese politics)
One youtube channel I enjoy watching is called 박가네 (ぱく家). It's a husband-and-wife team (she's Japanese, he's Korean), they live in Japan - mostly, I think, in the snowy reaches of Hokkaido. I highly recommend their videos, although they speak in Korean, so it won't be of much use to English speakers. They talk about issues big and small relating to life in Japan - social, economic, political - grounded in a very ordinary, average person perspective and offer insights which you won't get from more formal shows. They also back up their assertions with data, which is both useful and convincing. One of the things that I learned from watching their videos is the phenomenon of inherited seats in the Japanese parliament - an issue with no parallels in any other democracy (at least not today). 世襲政治 (세습정치, or hereditary politics) is where a parliamentary seat remains in the family, handed down from father to son.
Hereditary politics, or seshu seiji, is surprisingly common. Incredibly enough, one in three members of the Diet are 世襲議員 (seshu giin, 세습의원, hereditary politician). For example, the former prime minister Fumio Kishida is a seshu giin - his father and his grandfather were both members of the Diet. His son, Shotaro Kishida, was working as an aide in his father's prime ministerial office until he was kicked out due to a (very mild) scandal, and is expected to succeed his father in his parliamentary seat. The current defense minister, the handsome and somewhat witless Shinjiro Koizumi is fourth generation seshu giin.
I can't help but think this is a huge structural problem in Japanese democracy where a political district (especially rural districts) becomes a de facto fiefdom, resistant to change, and the sense of entitlement it inevitably brings on. Politics as a family business, feudal-style.