Word: japanned
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...Finance Minister, Shoichi Nakagawa, was forced to resign after appearing to be drunk (he said he was suffering the after-effects of cold medication) at a press conference during an important international meeting. "Typically recessions were good for the LDP," says Jesper Koll, president and CEO of Tantallon Research Japan, "but this time around it is sort of pathetic. The government has no credibility. Any policy that comes out now gets greeted not with just a yawn but with utter indifference...
...ozawa's support in the polls when compared with Japan's Prime Minister Taro Aso - the third lackluster holder of that office since Junichiro Koizumi resigned in 2006 - the dim view taken of his alleged role in the Nishimatsu scandal illuminates the paradox of Ozawa's place in Japanese politics. He is at one and the same time the single most radical critic of the Japanese postwar political establishment (it was his decision to bolt the LDP in 1993 that led to its only period out of office) and a supreme exemplar...
...politician himself, like so many other Japanese leaders (including that other maverick, Koizumi) he entered the Diet when he was just 27. Michael Green, chairman of Japan research at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, who knew Ozawa more than 20 years ago, remembers him back then as a traditional politician "focused on bringing home the bacon" to his constituency in Iwate prefecture in northeastern Honshu. His mentors include both Kakuei Tanaka, Prime Minister from 1972 to 1974, who treated Ozawa like a son and arranged his marriage, and Shin Kanemaru, who served as Deputy Prime Minister...
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...Ozawa is not, and has never been, just a political insider. Since the early 1990s he has articulated a vision of Japan as a place that had to be a "normal country," one that had its own interests, in which national goals were set by its elected politicians, and in which the bureaucracy's job was to implement a political program rather than shape policy themselves. During his interview with TIME, held in the DPJ's modest headquarters in Tokyo's Nagatacho district, Ozawa was asked if his analysis of the need for Japan to be a "normal country...