Word: koizumis
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...advisers who would guide him for three decades was already in place, led by his elder sister, Nobuko, who ran his Diet office; his younger brother, Masaya, who runs his Yokosuka home office; and Iijima, the political operative who takes care of his media and campaign strategies. What Koizumi lacked was the vital player in every politician's entourage: there was no Mrs. Koizumi. In 1977, the inner circle presented him with dozens of photos of potential spouses, which he stacked high on his parliamentary office desk. The one that caught his eye was of a kimono-clad beauty...
...months later, they were wed in a large ceremony at the Tokyo Prince Hotel, with 2,500 guests, many of them constituents of Koizumi's bused in from Yokosuka. His political mentor, Fukuda, was Prime Minister at the time, and he and his wife flanked the wedding couple, toasting them before a big cake shaped like the granite, fortress-like Diet building. Miyamoto moved in with the Koizumi family in their large, yet modest, two-story home in Yokosuka, where she was expected to cook meals and clean not only for her husband, but also for his mother...
...After four-and-a-half years of marriage, the couple divorced. Koizumi has never talked publicly about what happened, and Miyamoto remains discrete, saying only that it was a "situation between a husband and wife." The one person who will talk about the divorce is Koizumi's longtime aide, Iijima. "It was a political decision to end the marriage," he says. Iijima claims Miyamoto simply didn't cut it as a political wife. "If you marry a politician in Japan, you can either stay home and be a good wife, or if you want to get involved in the political...
...That ruthless streak will come in handy as Koizumi pursues his ambition to destroy old Japan. His ideological role model is Margaret Thatcher, the former British Prime Minister, whom he escorted around the Diet when she visited Japan back in the 1980s. Her mantras are his: privatize, cut government spending and stop mollycoddling loser companies. It's the opposite of his predecessors' prescription for Japan's woes. They spent more than $1 trillion over the past decade trying to rev up the moribund economy; Koizumi has promised to end this profligate spending, starting with a 10% cut in next year...
...This master plan, if carried out to its logical conclusion, will yield a special bonus for Koizumi: it will end patronage politics, and effectively destroy the traditional LDP. That's exactly why the Old Guard will resist his reforms. It's a matter of survival. For now, they're playing their cards close to the chest. Their few attempts at publicly berating Koizumi have backfired; those who dared have been inundated with hate mail and nasty phone calls. Instead, they're poised to start chipping away at Koizumi's program. Already, the bureaucrats, many of them allied with the conservatives...