Word: ozawa
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...stood for election, and Mieko Tanaka, a former secretary and actress who had a small role in an erotic horror film, Blind Beast vs. Killer Dwarf. The group has been criticized for being little more than pretty faces unqualified to hold public office. During campaigning, some newspapers dubbed them "Ozawa's princesses" because most were recruited to run for parliament by Ichiro Ozawa, the DPJ's 67-year-old secretary general and chief election strategist. By running a slate of female neophytes - many of them unknowns and outsiders - Ozawa drew fire from some pundits who accused him of offering...
...Regardless of the accusations, the tactics worked. Fukuda, for example, handily defeated LDP incumbent Fumio Kyuma, a former Defense Minister and nine-term parliamentarian. Yet, despite her lack of on-the-job experience, she and other Ozawa princesses are not political novices. A former psychology student who holds a black belt in karate, Fukuda at age 23 became a health care activist after discovering she was infected with the hepatitis virus by a contaminated blood transfusion she received as a newborn. She was just one of thousands of Japanese who received contaminated clotting agents in blood in the 1970s...
...medications can become available more quickly. "We need good social systems so people don't lose hope," she says. "There's so much uncertainty in society right now, so many suicides, so much worry and despair." This emphasis on issues of social justice leads some observers to hope that Ozawa's princesses can make a difference. By running for office, "These women weren't just looking for jobs," says Machiko Osawa, an economics professor at Japan Women's University. "They want to do something and change society. That's why they ran." But because of their lack of experience...
...first place, the DPJ's interest in finding a new balance is not just a matter of Hatoyama's speeches. Ichiro Ozawa, the veteran politician who is now the party's general secretary, has argued for decades that Japan should be a "normal" country, with its own foreign- and domestic-policy priorities, set in relation to its own interests. Ozawa is not anti-American; when I spoke to him earlier this year, he stressed that the U.S.-Japan alliance is "the most important relationship for Japan." But at the same time, Ozawa insisted that in "global disputes," Japan should take...
Other experts say Ozawa's new role is more focused on the interests of the party. Says Jun Okumura, a senior advisor at the think tank Eurasia Group and a former government official: "It's Hatoyama's Cabinet, and Ozawa's party. I don't think Ozawa will meddle on the policy side. He has his dream job - another crack at sticking the knife into the LDP heart without the distasteful job of being accountable to the media." Gerald Curtis, a Japanese-politics expert and professor at Columbia University, says the Hatoyama Administration is a game changer in Japanese politics...