Word: koizumi
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Sayonara, Koizumi...
...credited with helping engineer Japan's economic revival; in Tokyo. His controversial reforms halved Japanese banks' non-performing loans, saving many from collapse, and helped initiate the privatization of Japan's gigantic postal savings system. Currently Internal Affairs Minister, he has said he will retire when Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's term ends on Sept...
...Inevitably, Abe will be compared with his predecessor. Koizumi was happy to smash the old, sclerotic power structure of the LDP and appeal directly to the public. Abe seems more bound to his party; he is not the natural loner that Koizumi was. That makes him well-liked?even Morita calls him "a very kind, gentle young man." But it may also make him less willing to challenge the party, which Koizumi argued is an obstacle to reform. "He's very uncertain politically," says Iio. "He's not as confident in himself as Koizumi...
...veteran of the long campaign to shake up Japanese politics. There will be elections for the Diet's upper house next summer, and Ozawa has few equals as a campaigner. He has been courting politicians in the countryside, where the LDP's stranglehold on power has been eroded by Koizumi's reforms. "We have a great chance to challenge the LDP, especially in the rural areas," says Takeaki Matsumoto, the DPJ's policy chair. Much of Abe's current popularity is a legacy from Koizumi, and if the LDP were to have a disastrous result in the upper-house campaign...
...Even if next year's elections go well, Abe will still, to an extent, be surveying a landscape not of his making. The fractured LDP, the half-finished economic reforms, the deep divisions over Yasukuni, the uncertainty over the military's role?all these flow from the Koizumi years. But there is a role to play for the person who makes sense of what a predecessor started. Junji Higashi, a legislator with the New Komeito party who is close to Koizumi, says the outgoing Prime Minister loves to compare himself to Nobunaga Oda, the revolutionary warlord who all but conquered...