Junichiro Koizumi
Junichiro Koizumi won the leadership of his party by promising to destroy it, and governed for five years by treating his own supporters as the opposition. He was a third-generation politician with an outsider's manner, a mane of permed hair and a habit of answering questions in single sentences, and he had failed twice to win the party presidency before the rank and file gave it to him in 2001 over the candidate the factions had agreed on. His diagnosis was that the governing party's system of factional bargaining and public works spending was the thing preventing recovery, and that a decade of stimulus had bought bridges and stagnation. He appointed an academic to run economic policy, forced the banks to recognise and write off the bad loans they had carried since 1990, and let unprofitable firms fail. The centrepiece was the postal service, which through its savings and insurance arms was the largest financial institution on earth and the mechanism by which household savings were funnelled into public works and political patronage. When his own party's upper house voted the privatisation down in 2005, he dissolved the lower house, expelled the members who had opposed him, ran hand-picked candidates against them, and turned the election into a referendum on a single question. He won the largest majority the party had ever had. Abroad he was the closest ally the United States had in Asia, sending non-combat troops to Iraq in the first overseas deployment since 1945 and refuelling ships in the Indian Ocean. He also flew to Pyongyang in 2002 and extracted the first admission that North Korea had abducted Japanese citizens, which brought five of them home and poisoned the relationship permanently once the fate of the others became clear. Against all of that he insisted on visiting the shrine that commemorates the war dead including convicted war criminals, every year of his premiership, which froze relations with China and South Korea for the duration and cost him more diplomatically than the alliance gained.
- Lived: 1942 CE – ?
- Nationality: Japanese
- Roles: head_of_government
