Japan’s prime minister-designate Yukio Hatoyama yesterday vowed tough greenhouse gas cuts for the world’s No. 2 economy as he prepared for his government to take power next week. However, his plan to name key Cabinet posts yesterday was delayed because more talks on forming a coalition were needed.
“Since the talks on forming a coalition have not been settled, we’re not in a position to make an announcement yet,” Hatoyama said in brief comments to the media at the Tokyo headquarters of his Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ).
He had been expected to name his picks for several top Cabinet posts, including the foreign and finance ministers, last night.
But the DPJ has also been in talks with two smaller parties — the Social Democrats and the People’s New Party — whose support it needs in the upper house.
The new foreign minister is expected to be Katsuya Okada, 56, a former DPJ leader and one-time trade ministry technocrat.
The next finance minister is likely to be Hirohisa Fujii, 77, a political veteran who decades ago worked as a finance ministry bureaucrat and was also once a lawmaker with the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP)
The central policy coordinator — carrying the new title of state strategy minister — is expected to be one-time DPJ leader Naoto Kan, 62, who would double as the deputy prime minister. Kan was celebrated as a folk hero when, as a health minister in the mid-1990s, he fought his own bureaucrats and uncovered the ministry’s role in allowing the import and use of HIV-tainted blood products.
Hatoyama is scheduled to take over on Sept. 16 from Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso after the DPJ defeated the LDP in a landslide election on Aug. 30.
He said yesterday that Japan would seek to cut its emissions by 25 percent by 2020 from 1990 levels — a cut far deeper than Aso’s 8 percent reduction pledge.
“Our nation will strongly call on major countries around the world to set aggressive goals,” said Hatoyama, 62, who last week suggested that Japan would seek a greater voice in international diplomacy.
He will detail his plan, which he dubbed the “Hatoyama Initiative,” at a UN meeting on climate change in New York later this month. Japan will officially present its target at international talks in Copenhagen in December aimed at agreeing a follow-up treaty to the Kyoto Protocol which expires in 2012.
Yvo de Boer, the chief of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which preceded the Kyoto protocol, called the DPJ’s new target “laudable.”
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