With the sudden departure of Nakagawa Shoichi from twin posts of finance minister and state minister responsible for the financial services agency (FSA), Yosano Kaoru has been elevated from state minister for economic and fiscal policy and now holds all three positions simultaneously, making him, to borrow a term from American politics, the Aso government's …
Tag: Aso Taro
Aso follows Mori’s path
"President Bush will welcome Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori to Washington for a working visit March 19. In addition to their important shared security objectives in the Asia-Pacific region, the United States and Japan have common interests on a broad range of global issues. The President looks forward to exchanging views with Prime Minister Mori on …
And there you have it
Nakagawa Shoichi has indicated that he will resign following the passage of the 2009 budget and budget-related bills.As MTC notes, "Provided that the Asō Cabinet is still existence then, I would have to add."I would add that with Nakagawa Shoichi's self-destruction, the power of the LDP's ideological conservatives appears to be in freefall.Consider the HANA …
Nakagawa will not survive
Nakagawa Shoichi's behavior at the G7 meeting in Rome — the slurred speech heard around the world — has quickly become a full-blown scandal.With the rallying cry of "exposing disgraceful behavior," the DPJ, the SDPJ, the JCP, and the PNP are preparing to submit a (non-binding) censure motion in the upper house.Mr. Nakagawa will go …
Nakagawa Shoichi is now Aso’s problem
As the above video illustrates, Nakagawa Shoichi, finance minister, financial services minister, and Aso ally appeared at the G7 meeting in Rome, where he stumbled and slurred his way through his remarks to the press and fell asleep during the plenary session.Hatoyama Yukio, DPJ secretary-general, has already called for Mr. Nakagawa to be fired for …
Aso falls below ten percent
NTV has just released a new opinion poll conducted over the weekend that shows that Aso Taro's approval rating has fallen below 10%, clocking in at 9.7% compared with 17.4% the previous month. His disapproval rating in the same poll rose seven points to 76.2%.Among the 55 respondents who said they support the Aso government, …
Koizumi laughs
Did Koizumi Junichiro just kill the Aso government with a laugh?Speaking at a meeting of the Diet members' group for the promotion of postal privatization, an LDP study group featuring a number of leading reformists, including Nakagawa Hidenao, Shiozaki Yasuhisa, Takebe Tsutomu, and Ishihara Nobuteru, Mr. Koizumi commented on Aso Taro's recent remarks about "revising" …
Just a flesh wound
Speaking in the lower house's budget committee on Monday, Aso Taro said, "If you compare our economic conditions to other countries, our wounds are shallow."Naturally I immediately thought of nothing so much as this:I think Jun Okumura is on to something when he writes that the prime minister isn't a "total nincompoop," just in his …
A twenty years’ crisis
"Japan is an economy that is almost certainly producing well below its productive capacity - that is, the immediate problem facing Japan is one of demand, not supply. And it gives every appearance of being in a liquidity trap - that is, conventional monetary policy appears to have been pushed to its limits, yet the …
The LDP fiddles while its kingdom burns
As LDP members increasingly come to terms with what looks to be certain defeat in this year's general election — described in graphic terms by MTC as the LDP's "thrashing about and coughing up blood" — the party's leaders continue to struggle in vain for some way to avoid destruction.As I mentioned in a discussion …
Tobias S. Harris 