Word: koizumi
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Right now, Japan's gargantuan banking crisis has taken center stage. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and the rest of the Diet squabble endlessly over the various iterations of bank proposals recommended by Financial Services Minister Heizo Takenaka, while the national media reports with increasing confidence that one or more of the the nation's four megabanks are in danger of imminent collapse. Last week, Takenaka gave the banks a deadline: they have four months to take convincing action aimed at solving their financial crisis or risk being nationalized...
...weeks ago, Takenaka had convinced the world that it could expect a set of proposals with real heft. But he, like so many before him, got mired in the morass of inertia and self-interest that is Japanese politics. Receiving lukewarm support from his boss Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, Takenaka has buckled. At a press briefing last week, Takenaka called his plan 'a good start.' Who says the Japanese have no sense of irony...
...Koizumi's opponents are worried about a host of factors, including what they deem a "Takenaka Recession." Under the finance chief's plan, the easy pipeline of money from complacent banks to profitless companies would be cut off, giving these companies no choice but to shut down and throw their workers out on the street. "Companies are going to go under and Japan offers no support for the unemployed," frets Minoru Morita, a prominent political analyst. Already, LDP politicians and Tokyo bankers are circulating a list of 51 companies presumed likely to meet with peril under the plan?including retailer...
...until they are impotent. Real reform, they say, is about as likely as the successful completion of that Hail Mary pass. "The reformers are on their own 25-yard line and the anti-reformers control the rest of the field," says Peter Ennis, editor of the Oriental Economist. For Koizumi, failure may mean the end of his last, best hope of being remembered as a great reformer. "If the latest round goes down poorly, Koizumi will very quickly start thinking about how to make an exit that preserves his political viability," predicts Gary Saxonhouse, a professor of economics at Princeton...
...extremists. Ito fled the scene but turned himself in to the police the following day. The news stunned lawmakers, many of whom were in the middle of a budget debate when the murder took place. "The use of violence to silence politicians is utterly unforgivable," said Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi. "I am incredibly outraged." Police, however, caution that the motive for the murder remains unclear. As the outspoken head of a Democratic Party of Japan anti-corruption committee known as the "G-Man Squad," Ishii fashioned himself as Japan's Eliot Ness. Ironically, he may have been best known...