Word: koizumis
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...were Junichiro Koizumi, about now you might be wishing you weren't so damned prophetic. During campaigning for parliamentary elections in July, the Japanese Prime Minister won over voters by giving them bad news, straight-up: the country's ailing economy would get a lot worse before it got better. Well, last week lived up to Koizumi's predictions, in spades. The benchmark stock market index sank to its lowest level in 17 years, new numbers showed that industrial output and retail sales are slowing more dramatically than expected and, in the unkindest cut of all, credit rating agency Moody...
...reality-check week for the Prime Minister, and for the people who believe he is the man who can pull the country out of its economic doldrums. The unremitting bad news rattled Koizumi into tracking back, ever so slightly, from his promises of speedy, painful reform. That pledge he made in July to limit government borrowing this year to $8.25 billion? Now he says that's just a target, not written in stone. Those big-spending supplementary budgets he derided in his stump speeches? Koizumi now thinks one will be necessary this year, after all. The three-year deadline...
...Most people seem to like the Koizumi they see. What's not to like about this touchy-feely New Age leader who is the antithesis of the stiff old pols who preceded him? Economists at home and abroad laud the clear-eyed reformer who recognizes that the system stinks?and says he will take a sledgehammer to it. Fellow world leaders wish they had his approval ratings, which stand at about 70%. "Whatever you're doing," George W. Bush told Koizumi during his July visit to Camp David, "I envy those numbers." The Japanese can't get enough...
...quite. In reality, much of the Koizumi story?and a sizeable chunk of his persona?has been carefully airbrushed out of his public profile. Few realize that the effervescent election campaigner is in fact a loner, isolated from all but a tight-knit circle of longtime advisers; or that the New Age reformer is an old-fashioned nationalist at heart, influenced by some of the country's most extreme right-wing politicians; or that the man with the seemingly natural empathy for people is, in his private life, aloof and cold, prone to putting career before family. And only...
...understanding of the inner Koizumi is crucial: his chances of resuscitating the world's second-largest economy may depend on which aspects of his complicated character govern his decisions and actions...