Word: dieting
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...that Ihei Aoki, his right-hand man, had received a 50 million-yen ($347,222) loan from the Recruit Co. two years ago that apparently found its way into the Takeshita campaign chest. The disclosure flatly contradicted the version of events that Takeshita had laid out before the Japanese Diet in early April. Two days after the Aoki story broke, Takeshita came to the conclusion that he could not keep his job; public disapproval was so strong that his government's popularity rating had plummeted to a mortifying 3.6%. "I have decided to step down," Takeshita told his countrymen...
...short term, the L.D.P. will be preoccupied with designating a new Prime Minister. Takeshita promised to resign when the Diet enacted a 1989 budget, now one month overdue. In a departing act of bravado, Takeshita defied the Diet's tradition of consensus to push the budget through the lower house without the participation of the opposition parties. They had refused to take part until former Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone, in office when the most flagrant abuses occurred, testified about his role. The budget will probably become law in 30 days, and Takeshita will step down...
...standards, the expectations. The audience lives on a diet of television that is something like McDonald's hamburgers -- nobody asks how nutritious they are; they taste good. Without any lack of gratitude, I remember thinking after Chariots of Fire won the Academy Award that it was the kind of film audiences should expect every single week and shouldn't be accounted the best film of the year. I only became comfortable when Killing Fields won. Somewhere in the recesses of my mind, I believed that taken together the two films deserved an Oscar...
...Diet members of all ranks, moreover, are routinely expected to ante up for their constituents at weddings, funerals and other rites of passage. A survey of 89 Diet members by the daily Asahi Shimbun showed that each spent about $4,200 a month on an average of seven weddings and 27 funerals. Thus, despite the call by Takeshita and others for campaign-financing reform, University of Tokyo political scientist Takashi Inoguchi remains pessimistic. Says he: "How can we carry out reforms when even the voters are getting money...
Reforming the system could take a very long time. More immediately, Takeshita is eager just to get the Recruit scandal behind him. For one thing, the Diet's opposition forces are holding hostage the nation's budget, which should have been in place April 1. They refuse to debate it until the L.D.P. agrees to allow Nakasone to testify under oath about his role in the Recruit affair. For another, Takeshita must set a date for elections to the Diet's upper house by Aug. 13, and in the poisonous atmosphere created by Recruit, the L.D.P.'s chances of winning...