Word: koizumi
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...issue could cloud ongoing nuclear negotiations. "South Korea doesn't want this to be an obstacle in the six-party talks," says Kim, "but it could become one." China, meanwhile, was supportive of Japan's position until relations between the two nations cooled drastically over former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's repeated visits to the controversial Yasukuni Shrine, where Japan's war dead (including several class-A war criminals) are memorialized...
...general secretary [Aso] and all LDP lawmakers, party members and especially the Japanese public for causing a political vacuum." Aso's closeness to Abe, most analysts say, is what cost him his third bid for prime minister. The party instead looked to Fukuda, the long-serving speaker of Junichiro Koizumi's colorful cabinet and a skilled consensus builder, to rebuild and regain voters' confidence...
...Japan has moved on from the reductionist U.S. good/China bad (or vice versa) matrix of the cold war era. The Japanese public, newly confident of their nation's place in the world but worried about economic concerns back home, deserves better than an old guard. Abe's predecessor Junichiro Koizumi, himself heir to a minor political dynasty, created the impression of trimming family political ties by installing private-sector civilians in key leadership posts. But Abe's most recent Cabinet re-embraced the political nobility - and neither Fukuda nor Aso can be counted on to do anything very different...
That much Fukuda can likely accomplish. As chief cabinet secretary for popular former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi - a post he held for a record 1,259 days, a period unmatched by any other post World War II minister - Fukuda earned a reputation for calm competency that should appeal to a public and a party still shocked by the utter disintegration of Abe's administration. But it seems far less likely that Fukuda will be able to help the LDP at the ballot box. (Legislative elections aren't scheduled until 2009, but with the opposition empowered by its recent win, early...
More broadly, Abe's resignation spells the end of an attempt among more conservative members of the LDP to loosen the bounds of postwar pacifism and forge a true military alliance with the U.S. That change gathered momentum under Abe's popular predecessor, Junichiro Koizumi, who committed Japanese forces to assisting the U.S. in anti-terror operations - including in Iraq - and made noises about revising Japan's constitutional restrictions on military activity. (Japanese troops are allowed to act only in self-defense.) When he came to power, Abe made constitutional revision one of his top priorities, and kept...