Shigeru Ishiba likes the nitty-gritty of policy, cigarettes and making models, but his dream job as Japanese prime minister could go up in smoke this weekend. Opinion polls suggest that Ishiba’s coalition could lose its majority in upper house elections on Sunday,

Ishiba, 68, a self-confessed defense “geek,” is the son of a regional governor and is from Japan’s small Christian minority. He won the party leadership in September last year, on his fifth try, to become the LDP’s 10th separate prime minister since 2000, all of them men.

With few willing to take the contaminated earth, the government took it upon itself to reuse some of the soil to show it is not dangerous.

By Junko Fujita and Kevin Buckland TOKYO (Reuters) -Heading into the most consequential Japanese upper house election in memory and a possible defeat for the coalition of Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba,