Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan said yesterday he would not step down after it emerged that he had received political donations from a foreign national, days after his foreign minister quit over a similar issue.
The unpopular Kan was already facing calls to resign or call a snap election and has been struggling to pass bills to implement a US$1 trillion budget in parliament, where opposition parties are blocking the legislation and attacking the government over policy missteps.
Analysts said they expected him to stand firm.
Photo: Reuters
“Kan was already suffering from 100 wounds, this donation affair is just the 101st,” said political analyst Hirotaka Futatsuki, predicting that he would hang on until at least June.
The Asahi newspaper said that donations from a Korean national living in Japan totaling over ¥1 million (US$12,000) were received by Kan’s political funds group in 2006 and 2009, including in November 2009 when Kan was serving as deputy prime minister after his Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) took power for the first time.
About 600,000 ethnic Koreans live in Japan, many of whom are descended from those who came when the Korean Peninsula was a Japanese colony from 1910 to 1945.
Accepting donations from -foreign nationals is illegal if done so knowingly.
“I had thought that this person was a Japanese national,” Kan told a parliamentary committee. “I checked with my office and it had indeed received donations [from this person] ... If this person is confirmed to be a foreign national, I would like to fully return the donations.”
Kyodo news agency quoted Kan as saying he would not resign and Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano told a news conference: “I have heard that the prime minister is absolutely not thinking about such a thing.”
Kotaro Nogami, an upper house lawmaker from the main opposition Liberal Democratic Party, said the problem would not go away by simply returning the money.
Former Japanese foreign minister Seiji Maehara resigned on Sunday after he admitted taking political donations from a Korean national living in Japan, adding to pressure on a prime minister whose popular support is languishing at about 20 percent.
“He cannot quit because the government would collapse, but the administration will be further weakened,” Futatsuki said.
If Kan did step down, becoming the fifth Japanese prime minister to exit after a year or less in office, it would create further uncertainty over the fate of bills needed to implement the budget and policies needed to curb public debt already twice the size of the US$5 trillion economy.
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