Word: koizumi
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...regional responses to future diplomatic crises. That Abe managed to schedule the meetings at all was an impressive achievement, requiring the blue-blooded conservative to dodge toward the ideological center. China and South Korea had cut off most high-level contacts with Japan to protest former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's visits to the Yasukuni Shrine war memorial, which they view as a monument to Japanese imperialism. Abe was thought to be even more unrepentant than Koizumi on the issue. Yet he recently told the Diet that his government accepted previous official Japanese apologies for the country's aggression...
...distinguishing his administration from the previous one in other ways. To compensate for what even his own supporters perceive as a lack of Koizumi's charisma, Abe has taken a team-oriented approach. He packed his cabinet with close associates, expanded the number of prime-ministerial advisers from two to five and began forming a Japanese equivalent of the U.S. National Security Council, reporting directly to the Prime Minister. The creation of Team Abe is an attempt to shift political power away from Kasumigaseki, where Japan's formidable bureaucrats toil. "There's always been a struggle between...
...upper-house elections. Many analysts are doubtful, not least because Abe has yet to set out his domestic agenda. His maiden Diet speech contained a lot of rhetoric about the need to make Japan a "beautiful country" without mentioning specific, results-oriented policy initiatives that were a hallmark of Koizumi's administration. "He talks about economic revitalization and closing the gap between urban and rural regions, but he insists on cutting public spending," says Nihon University's Iwai. "There are certain inherent contradictions in what he says, and he hasn't addressed them." Adds Etsushi Tanifuji, director of the Institute...
...this he is very clear on where he stands." Given Kim Jong Il's track record, Abe can probably count on him to create trouble down the road, giving another boost to the Japanese leader's image as a "fighting politician," as his advisers put it. But Abe, like Koizumi, will ultimately be defined by how well he can manage Japan's recovering economy, solve the government's fiscal woes and ensure LDP dominance at the polls. Dealing with a nuclear crisis may be the easy part...
...That the Beijing and Seoul summits happened at all was a surprise. A Japanese leader had not visited Beijing in five years and Seoul in more than a year, in part due to former Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's controversial visits to Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine, which honors 14 Japanese war criminals along with 2.5 million war dead. The diplomatic deep freeze was worsened by rising nationalism in both South Korea and China, which culminated with violent anti-Japanese demonstrations throughout China in the spring of 2005. When Koizumi, in his last major act as Prime Minister, went...