The official campaign period for the LDP presidential election begins today, and the situation is extremely fluid due to the entrance of Fukuda Yasuo into the race, which Mainichi describes as having attracted an instant majority of Diet members thanks to support of the Machimura faction (80 members total) and some members in the Koga …
Tag: Koizumi Junichiro
The man to beat
From Kishi scion to Yoshida scion: with less than a week until the LDP presidential election, it seems hard to conceive at this point how anyone will be able to stop Aso Taro, professed manga lover and friend of otaku (oh, and longtime foreign minister and current LDP secretary-general).With Mr. Koizumi declaring that he will …
Anti-faction non-faction to become a faction?
Say that five times fast.In response to the readmission of Hiranuma Takeo, prominent postal rebel, to the LDP, and to the general thrust of discourse within the LDP — Mr. Abe's speech to the Diet yesterday notwithstanding — the reform-minded "Koizumi children" are apparently at work preparing to convert their study group into a formal …
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Can’t go home again
In an essay in the forthcoming issue of the Far Eastern Economic Review that I co-authored with Doug Turner, we discuss that the challenge for the LDP going forward is reconfiguring the party's identity for the post-Koizumi era. Reform or reaction? Urban or rural? These are the questions that the party has to answer.And yet …
Paradigm shift in the offing?
With political Japan in vacation mode, the decision by the DPJ leadership to oppose extension of the anti-terrorism special measures law continues to cast a shadow over the alliance. Defense Minister Koike's visit to Washington seems to have done little to ease American fears — her speech at CSIS, available online here, seems to contain …
Abe after the election
With the government still defiantly rejecting suggestions that Prime Minister Abe should take responsibility for a major defeat in Sunday's election — a debate that is about as clear as a sign one can get of the LDP giving up and perhaps praying for rain (or a heat wave) — I cannot help but wonder …
Democracy is the issue
The DPJ appears to be advancing on all fronts, pushing hard even in "conservative kingdoms" like Kagoshima Prefecture in Kyushu, the surprisingly competitive election in Kagoshima being the subject of an article in today's Yomiuri (surprise! not online).If the campaign continues this way until Sunday, even my worst-case scenario prediction will likely miss high.Not surprisingly, …
Who misses Koizumi more, the Japanese people or the foreign press?
This week's Economist and today's FT both carry articles discussing the shadow cast by former Prime Minister Koizumi over the Upper House elections — and over his hapless and, according to Mr. Koizumi, kawaiso successor.I have no doubt that there are segments of public opinion and sections of the LDP that would be glad to …
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Kyuma who?
In a move so blindingly obvious it hurts, Koike Yuriko, Abe's highly touted "national security adviser," has been appointed as the new defense minister.With a new boss appointed to Ichigaya within hours of Kyuma's resignation, one wonders whether they will also be airbrushing Kyuma out of pictures from the past nine months.It will be curious …
After the Yoshida Doctrine, what?
Over at Shisaku, MTC notes in a thoughtful post on the Yoshida Doctrine, "Yet even now, sixteen years down the line, the Yoshida tradeoff rules as the master narrative underpinning all discussion of Japan's security options."Yet I wonder if the Yoshida Doctrine lives on only as a function of the institutional and constitutional constraints that …
Tobias S. Harris 