Word: fukuda
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...fact, Koizumi knew early defeat. He lost his first election in 1969, an embarrassing failure to fill his father's seat. The future Prime Minister was sent off to work for an L.D.P. heavyweight, Takeo Fukuda. Koizumi answered the phone, ran errands and dusted Fukuda's shoes. He finally took his father's place in 1972, but the years with Fukuda were well spent. For an L.D.P. baron, Fukuda was famously incorruptible, and Koizumi watched his mentor lose power to factions of the party that had perfected pork-barrel politics. Koizumi today rants about the waste in government spending largely...
...After that electoral defeat, Koizumi signed up as an assistant to an LDP heavyweight, Takeo Fukuda. The job involved answering the phone, greeting guests, running errands and even dusting Fukuda's shoes. It was Koizumi's political boot camp. His antiestablishment streak developed under Fukuda, himself a bright, squeaky-clean policy wonk who frequently took on the LDP's most powerful clique, headed by Kakuei Tanaka and filled with politicians with cozy ties to special interest groups like construction bosses, farmers and war veterans. This is the faction most dependent on pork-barrel politics, campaign war chests and the obtaining...
...Under Fukuda, Koizumi also learned the importance of developing a personality. For as clean-cut as Fukuda was, he was unable to connect with the masses and thus lacked the power base from which to do battle with the Old Guard. Koizumi carefully cultivated the image of the Outsider. He avoided the restaurants where politicians lived it up and cut their backroom deals. "Faction bosses would go out with their underlings, drinking and singing," says Takao Toshikawa, a political analyst in Tokyo. "But they would all look around the restaurant, and someone would say, 'Where's Koizumi?' He never went...
...After his stint in Fukuda's office, Koizumi took another stab at his father's seat in 1972, and won. By now, he was a more self-confident public speaker and was learning to shed his congenital aloofness, at least when on the campaign trail. "He started to get more comfortable with the public side of politics, and was sounding more like his father," says Teruo Nakagomi, an old family friend. (Nakagomi, a barber, is the man who gave Koizumi his trademark haircut...
...another odd coincidence, that same August, as Fukuda investigated the new virus in Hong Kong, the quest to understand the 1918 epidemic suddenly gained momentum, with help from a surprising quarter. Out of the blue, Taubenberger got a letter from a retired San Francisco pathologist, Johan Hultin, who had read Taubenberger's paper in Science and saw at last an opportunity for which he had been waiting for nearly a half-century...