Word: kan
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...ELECTED. KATSUYA OKADA, 50, to the presidency of the Democratic Party of Japan, the country's largest opposition party; in Tokyo. Former leader Naoto Kan resigned earlier this month after being implicated in Japan's ongoing pension-payment scandal. Formerly the party's secretary-general, Okada accepted the post reluctantly after other prominent party members declined, saying that it "may be my fate" to lead...
...most critical problems-its drastically underfunded and byzantine public pension system-has thrown the entire government into chaos. Public outrage over lawmakers' failures to pay into the national pension system has tainted dozens of politicians, claimed the careers (at least temporarily) of some of its brightest stars, including Kan himself, and left the opposition party crippled...
...broke on April 23 when three members of the Cabinet revealed that they had, at some point, failed to make their payments. The ministers' excuses (which were a mostly believable plea that they got tripped up in the complexity of the system they helped create) fell on deaf ears. Kan, who had been among the most vocal proponents of a complete pension overhaul, dialed the outrage up another level, castigating the Cabinet members as "the three nonpayment brothers." It was great demagoguery, but as it turned out, Kan himself had not paid into the system for 10 months...
...moves that are certain only to encourage more delinquency. Yet rather than focus on the real scandal-that Japan's citizens labor under a pension system that won't come close to providing for them-newspapers continue to call for more resignations. With the departure of capable politicians like Kan and Fukuda, the likelihood that the system will ever see real change is diminished. So much for Japan's new era of political maturity...
...When the government institutes a sin, it’s the job of God’s people to say something about it,” said Ben Phelps, 28, a Topeka, Kan., resident who had traveled to Cambridge with several members of his church group...