Word: takenaka
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...even he seemed shaken when his longtime supporter Mikio Aoki took the floor of the Diet last Tuesday and added his voice to the growing dissension over the Prime Minister's latest round of banking reform proposals. In a withering attack, he accused Koizumi's new finance chief Heizo Takenaka of being a loose cannon, an unelected and unaccountable radical operating outside the system. And he finished with a direct salvo against the man he used to defend, telling Koizumi, "What is lacking most is leadership in coping with economic issues." When the barrage was over, the Prime Minister smiled...
...That was just the opening act of a contentious political drama still playing out on the floor of the Diet, one that may prove the most important showdown of Koizumi's career. The fate of Takenaka and his banking plans has become a critical test of the underwhelming Koizumi era. If Koizumi enacts the package without sacrificing all of its major planks, the path toward sweeping economic reform may have finally begun. If, however, the formidable phalanx of Koizumi's opponents blocks the proposals?or waters them down to the point of irrelevance?then the Prime Minister's credibility...
...reputation for being all charisma, no clout. "He's always been a reformer at heart, but he wasted a lot of political capital by taking on secondary issues," says Steve Vogel, a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. That's why Koizumi's appointment of Takenaka last month to head the financial services agency surprised many, who took it as a demonstration of renewed seriousness about breaking the reform gridlock. Others saw it as a last-ditch effort?the political equivalent of the Hail Mary pass?to salvage any semblance of a lasting legacy...
...professor of economics at Keio University, Takenaka had been a longtime critic of the Japanese financial system and a vocal agitator for bank reform. In his new position, he quickly assembled an 11-member task force to formulate a rescue plan for the banks, whose inability to allocate capital to investment-worthy projects has hobbled the economy. Takenaka's outsider ways soon alienated the establishment. Critics charged that he was too secretive and too radical, that he sought American-style economic solutions to uniquely Japanese problems?or worse, that he was part of a devious American plot to buy Japanese...
...APPOINTED. HEIZO TAKENAKA, 51, Japan's reform-minded Minister of State for Economic and Fiscal Policy, to the additional post of Financial Services Minister; in Tokyo. The dapper ex-professor's promotion is seen as a sign of renewed determination by Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi to reduce the mountain of bad loans held by Japan's banks...