When not bowling together, former prime ministers Koizumi Junichiro and Mori Yoshiro apparently spend their time scheming against Japanese democracy.Both have signed on as advisers — along with Abe Shinzo, another former prime minister from the Machimura faction — to a new LDP study group called the "Diet members league to integrate both houses of …
Tag: Koizumi Junichiro
Realignment scenarios
After months of talking about forming a new party, Hiranuma Takeo, a leading LDP postal rebel who spurned LDP efforts to bring him back into the party during the Abe era, may finally be taking steps to create a new conservative party that may yet be a fly in the LDP's ointment.Mr. Hiranuma has reportedly …
Koizumi Junichiro, whipping boy
"The nonsense of public opinion that hopes for Pitcher Koizumi, ringleader in making an unequal society, to take the mound again."So reads the headline of an opinion piece at JanJan by Sato Shuichi, a journalist and activist.Sato uses an extended — and I mean extended — baseball metaphor to discuss the transfer of power from …
Koizumi goes to work for the government?
The Fukuda government has announced that it will definitely proceed with plans to submit the tax bill to the HR for a second vote on 30 April, the day after the expiration of the sixty-day Article 59 window. No word from Asahi or Mainichi about whether the LDP and Komeito will face defections when the …
Mori discusses the post-Fukuda era
Mori Yoshiro, the man who probably has as good a claim as anyone to the title of LDP kingmaker, appeared on The Sunday Project yesterday.He treated viewers to his assessments of potential successors for Mr. Fukuda, although he made clear that he still stands behind the prime minister (although who knows how much longer that …
Signs of compromise?
With the end of Fukui Toshihiko's term as BOJ president rapidly approaching, there are signs that the LDP and the DPJ might be able to come to terms on the nomination of his successor.Messrs. Oshima and Yamaoka, Diet strategists for the LDP and DPJ respectively, met once more on Thursday and agreed that a vacancy …
Obama, Koizumi, and the DPJ
I have learned that Ozawa Ichiro reportedly dispatched a DPJ member to observe Barack Obama's presidential campaign in Texas in advance of Tuesday's voting.He could have saved some money and looked closer to home at the politics of former prime minister Koizumi Junichiro.There are a few obvious superficial similarities — and a few equally obvious …
Hosokawa-Koizumi New Party?
Facta, a monthly, has a short item available at Yahoo! Japan's Minna no Seiji site speculating about a February meeting between former prime ministers Hosokawa and Koizumi.Mr. Hosokawa, who after heading up the first non-LDP government left politics to seclude himself in Kanagawa and work as an artist, met secretly with Mr. Koizumi in late …
The LDP’s personal-ideological struggles
Several media outlets, including Sankei and Jiji, have reported on comments by Kato Koichi, former LDP secretary-general and Kochikai faction leader, in which he declared, "The YKK is over."The YKK, which stands for Yamasaki (Taku), Kato (Koichi), Koizumi (Junichiro), was a political alliance formed in the early 1990s in opposition to the Tanakist politics of …
The DPJ gets its groove back (for now)
The past six months in Japanese politics have seen some surprising and unexpected events and reversals of momentum — and it looks as if we're in the midst of the latest shift in momentum. The DPJ, after a shaky start to the current Diet session following the government's deft maneuvering on the MSDF refueling mission …
Tobias S. Harris 