Word: koizumi
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Amid this gloom, the Japanese are placing their hopes on a Prime Minister who comes across like a rock star. Junichiro Koizumi is a 59-year-old career foot soldier of the Liberal Democratic Party, which, except for one brief period, has ruled Japan for the past 46 years. But Koizumi has shrewdly positioned himself as an outsider. "If my party tries to destroy my reforms, if they try to stand in my way, I won't hesitate to destroy the party itself," he said repeatedly while he was campaigning for parliamentary candidates this summer...
...Koizumi's program is revolutionary. It amounts to a systematic unraveling of Japan's political and financial institutions. To help ease the burden of the government's debt, estimated to be as high as $5.5 trillion by some economists, he has proposed cutting the budget 10% and shifting spending from public-works projects to education, job training and environmental cleanup. Koizumi has set a three-year target for settling the balance sheets of Japan's heavily indebted banks. He has appointed a free-wheeling Cabinet that is younger, more female and includes more outsiders than any seen before. Most stunning...
Such sentiments are common. Every word Koizumi speaks is golden. Whether celebrating with a champion sumo wrestler, tossing a baseball back and forth with President Bush, or commiserating with leprosy victims mistreated for decades by the government, Koizumi has touched a downcast nation. A record label has released a CD of his favorite Elvis hits. There's a mint-flavored Koizumi chewing gum. Last week stores started selling a coffee-table book with snapshots of Koizumi in a bathrobe, Koizumi reading, Koizumi playing baseball, Koizumi eating noodles. "The whole country is depressed," says Masaaki Nagamoto, 45, a law clerk shopping...
...most," says Heizo Takenaka, an economics professor who last spring joined the Cabinet. At the top of that list: the crusty political barons and their backroom deals, the endless paving of highways that go nowhere, schools that stress conformity over creativity. Yet in any time but the present, Koizumi would never have been trusted. He has a reputation as a lone wolf, a bit of an eccentric. In the past, that would have doomed him in a nation where mavericks traditionally have been mistrusted...
WHAT HAPPENED: Ten years after its real estate bubble burst, the world's second-largest economy is a mess. Prices are falling, which means consumers won't buy, thinking goods will be cheaper next week. Banks are crushed by bad debts. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi wants to reform the economy and let bankrupt firms go to the wall. Result: in the short term, more pain and record levels of unemployment...