Japan’s Prime Minister Naoto Kan yesterday huddled with aides to choose a Cabinet lineup that will help him tackle pressing challenges, from reviving Asia’s top economy to mending strained US ties.
Kan replaced Yukio Hatoyama on Friday to become Japan’s fifth prime minister in four years, after Hatoyama stumbled over a dispute about a US airbase and became mired in political funding scandals.
Kan, a one-time leftist activist, received a generally warm welcome from the press, with one major daily highlighting that he was the first prime minister in more than a decade not to hail from one of Japan’s political dynasties.
PHOTO: AFP
“Japan’s politics has turned a new page,” the Asahi Shimbun said in an editorial. “Mr Kan was raised in the family of an ordinary salaryman. He has a unique background, as many of the post-war prime ministers came from political families or the bureaucracy.”
Kan, 63, previously served as finance minister and deputy prime minister in Hatoyama’s center-left government, which came to power last year in a groundbreaking election that ended decades of conservative rule.
Newspapers warned Kan must take swift action to tackle problems including the issue that brought down Hatoyama: plans to relocate the unpopular US airbase on Japan’s subtropical island of Okinawa.
Hatoyama resigned on Wednesday after he backtracked on an election promise to move the Marine Corps base off Okinawa, enraging locals as well as the pacifist Social Democrats, who quit his coalition.
As the dispute festered for months, the last prime minister and his ministers baffled leaders in the US, Japan’s bedrock ally of the post-war era, with often vague or contradictory statements.
“The Japan-US alliance is deeply damaged because of the policy errors by the Hatoyama administration,” the Yomiuri Shimbun said in an editorial. “It is important to end America’s distrust of Japan.”
Kan was holding a closed-door meeting yesterday with his top aides at the headquarters of his Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) to discuss the Cabinet lineup to be announced on Tuesday.
Former vice finance minister Yoshihiko Noda, a 52-year-old fiscal hawk, may be promoted to become finance minister amid growing pressure to revive the world’s No. 2 economy and slash mounting public debt, media reported.
Yoshito Sengoku, the former national strategy minister, was expected to be tapped for chief Cabinet secretary, a powerful ministerial-level position often regarded as second only to the prime minister, the reports said.
Some key ministers, including Defense Minister Toshimi Kitazawa, were seen as likely to retain their posts as Kan seeks a measure of continuity ahead of upper house elections next month.
Kan must also deal with divisions within his DPJ, a party formed in the 1990s as a broad tent of groups of different political stripes, from conservative party defectors to one-time socialists like himself.
Kan plans to appoint next week a new party secretary general to replace Ichiro Ozawa, a veteran backroom fixer dubbed the “Shadow Shogun” for his power behind the throne.
When Hatoyama tearfully resigned last week he took Ozawa down with him, saying both men had to go as they had become mired in funding scandals that have seen close aides indicted.
Ozawa, the architect of last year’s election victory, commands a following of some 150 rookie lawmakers, a faction dubbed “Ozawa’s children” who owe their careers to the veteran who handpicked many of them.
Kan last week publicly criticized Ozawa, a one-time member of the conservative Liberal Democratic Party, and urged him to “stay quiet.”
Ozawa’s followers, many of whom are believed to have voted against Kan, may now also oppose his choice for DPJ secretary-general, Yukio Edano, 46.
Speculation is even growing that Ozawa could seek to dethrone Kan, whose faction counts only about 60 lawmakers, by fielding his own candidate or standing himself at the next DPJ leadership election in September.
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