Junichiro Koizumi (小泉 純一郎 Koizumi Jun'ichirō, born January 8, 1942) is a Japanese politician and the 87th, and current, Prime Minister of Japan.

Contents

1 Personal life and education 2 Political life 3 Popularity 4 Controversy 5 List of Koizumi Cabinet members 6 External links

Personal life and education

He was born in Yokosuka City, Kanagawa prefecture to Junya Koizumi, a director general of the Defense Agency and a second-generation Diet member, and was educated at Yokosuka High School and Keio University, where he studied economics. He was briefly at University College London before returning to Japan in December 1969 on the death of his father.

Before becoming Prime Minister, he had married in 1978. The marriage ended in divorce in 1982 and he vowed never to marry again. He has three sons, two of whom live with him (Shinjiro Koizumi and Kotaro Koizumi) and have not met their mother since the divorce. The youngest, Yoshinaga Miyamoto, a student at Keio University, has never met his father and has been turned away when he tried to meet him by attending his grandfather's funeral.

Political life

After a failed attempt to get elected he did become a member of the Lower House for the 11th Kanagawa Prefecture in December 1972. He was a member of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and joined the Fukuda faction, he has been re-elected ten times. He became in 1992 Minister of Posts and Telecommunnications under the government of Kiichi Miyazawa. He was three times Minister of Health and welfare under the government of Noboru Takeshita, Sosuke Uno and Ryutaro Hashimoto.

He gained his first senior post in 1979 as Parliamentary Vice-Minister of Finance and his first ministerial post in 1988 as Minister of Health and Welfare under Noboru Takeshita. He had cabinet posts again in 1992 and 1996-1998. In 1994, with the LDP in opposition, he became part of a new LDP faction, Shinseiki, made up of younger and more motivated parliamentarians.

He competed for the presidency of the LDP in September 1995 and July 1999, but he gained little support losing decisively to Ryutaro Hashimoto and then Keizo Obuchi. In April 2000 Obuchi was replaced by Yoshiro Mori after falling seriously ill. Koizumi became leader of his party on his third attempt on April 24, 2001. He had 298 votes, while his closest rival, Ryutaro Hashimoto gained 155 votes, Koizumi's victory was due to local chapters being allowed to vote as well as Diet members. He was made Prime Minister on April 26, 2001. His coalition secured 78 of 121 seats in the Upper House elections in July.

Popularity

Initially he was an extremely popular leader with his outspoken nature and colourful past. Nicknames included 'Lionheart' and 'maverick'. He pushed for new ways to revitalise the moribund economy, aiming to act against bad debts with commercial banks, privatise the postal savings system, and reorganise the factional structure of the LDP. He spoke of the need for a period of painful restructuring in order to improve the future. To these aims, he first appointed an economist and a commentator, Heizo Takenaka , to the job of reforming the banking sector. Under their reign, the bad debts of banks have been cut dramatically with the NPL ratio of major banks approaching half the level of 2001, the Japanese economy has been through a slow but long recovery, and the stock market dramatically rebounded. The GDP for 2004 is expected to record one of the highest among G7 nations according to IMF and OECD. Takenaka was appointed as a Postal Reform Minister in 2004 and the privatization of the country's Postal Savings system is reaching a critical moment. All this took place despite the strong opposition to his reform plans among the "old guards" within LDP and the bureaucracy. He sacked his popular but volatile Foreign Minister Makiko Tanaka in January 2002, replacing her with Yoriko Kawaguchi He was reelected in 2003 and his popularity surged as the economy recovered. A recent proposal to cut pensions benefits for the fiscal reform, however, turned out to be wildly unpopular, just like similar changes in other economies of the world, and restricted his administration's approval rating in the upper house election in 2004 to being only marginally better than the opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). Nevertheless, with no more election in sight during his tenure, Koizumi is positioned well to push through the remaining reforms to sustain Japan's economic recovery.

Controversy

Koizumi's liberal credentials with the rest of Asia were damaged by a controversial visit to the Yasukuni Shrine on August 13, 2001. His grandfather built an airfield in Kagoshima used for kamikaze missions, 1944-5, and a family relative (cousin) died on such a mission, which partly explains his keenness to visit the Yasukuni shrine. (Another reason is a desire in the LDP to 'stand up to' China and North Korea, and a feeling that shrine visits are a domestic Japanese matter, a feeling not shared by some neighbouring countries.) Koizumi also approved the expansion of the Self-Defense Forces (SDF) and in October 2001 they were given greater scope to operate outside of the country.

On January 1, 2004, Koizumi made a surprise New Year's visit to the Yasukuni Shrine. It was his fourth visit to the shrine since becoming Prime Minister. Again, the visit drew strong condemnation and protests from Japan's neighbors, mainly the People's Republic of China, North and South Korea, who still hold bitter memories of Japanese colonization. For these governments, the event held even greater significance than previous visits in light of the imminent dispatch of Self-Defense Forces troops to Iraq, but the rest of the world including the Allies such as the U.S., Britain, Austraria, Spain, Italy, South Korea and Poland has been supportive of the non-combative, humanitarian dispatch of troops by Japan as a necessary adjustement to the changing global security agenda such as the war on terror.

List of Koizumi Cabinet members

• Minister for Public Management, Home Affairs, Posts and Telecommunications - Taro Aso
• Minister of Justice - Daizo Nozawa
• Minister of Foreign Affairs - Yoriko Kawaguchi
• Minister of Finance - Sadakazu Tanigaki
• Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology - Takeo Kawamura
• Minister of Health, Labour and Welfare - Chikara Sakaguchi
• Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries - Yoshiyuki Kamei
• Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry - Shoichi Nakagawa
• Minister of Land, Infrastructure and Transport - Nobuteru Ishihara
• Minister of the Environment - Yuriko Koike
• Chief Cabinet Secretary, Minister of State for Gender Equality - Hiroyuki Hosoda
• Chairman of the National Public Safety Commission, Minister of State for Youth Affairs and Measures for Declining Birthrate, Minister of State for Food Safety - Kiyoko Ono
• Minister of State for Defense - Shigeru Ishiba
• Minister of State for Okinawa and Northern Territories Affairs, Minister of State for Science and Technology Policy, Minister of State for Personal Information Protection, In charge of Information Technology - Toshimitsu Motegi
• Minister of State for Financial Services, Minister of State for Economic and Fiscal Policy - Heizo Takenaka
• Minister of State for Regulatory Reform, Minister of State for Industrial, Revitalization Corporation of Japan, Minister of State for Administrative Reform, Minister of State for Special Zones for Structural Reform, Minister of State for Regional Revitalization - Kazuyoshi Kaneko
• Minister of State for Disaster Management,Minister of State for National, Emergency Legislation - Kiichi Inoue

External links

• Prime Minister of Japan Official Website
• Biographical information on Junichiro Koizumi's divorce, ex-wife Kayoko Miyamoto, and their estranged children Yoshinaga Miyamoto, Kotaro Koizumi and Shinjiro Koizumi.

Preceded by: Yoshiro Mori

Prime Minister of Japan 2001—

Succeeded by: Incumbent