A parliamentary committee approved closely watched legislation yesterday to privatize Japan's sprawling postal savings system and create the world's largest bank.
The package will go to the full chamber of the upper house of parliament, which is expected to vote on the measure on Monday.
The package is at the center of a fierce political debate pitting Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, a champion of the reforms, against opponents in his own Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).
Koizumi has suggested he would dissolve parliament and call general elections if the upper house rejects the proposal. The package narrowly passed the lower house last month.
Koizumi had hoped for a full-floor vote on privatization by yesterday, but that had to be delayed because of resistance from the unified opposition and some LDP members.
Opponents say they fear the reforms will reduce postal services in rural areas, lead to layoffs of postal workers and create a bank of such size that it would dwarf other private banks in Japan.
Upper house lawmaker Hirofumi Nakasone said he would vote against the reforms.
"If things carry on like this until the plenary session, I cannot help casting a `no' vote," he said.
Nakasone, the son of influential former conservative prime minister Yasuhiro Nakasone, is said to be able to bring with him several other votes, which will be critical as Koizumi himself has predicted a razor-thin margin Monday.
But Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroyuki Hosoda said Koizumi's statements on the bills in parliament earlier this week had diluted some of the opposition.
"This is really up to the individual judgment of each lawmaker ... but I think those explanations have cleared the doubts raised previously on the bill," Hosoda said.
With the opposition against the reforms, 18 LDP defectors would be enough to reject the bill. Japanese media have reported that 12 of the 114 LDP members in the upper house have voiced their opposition to the bills.
Education Minister Nariaki Nakayama urged opponents "to reconsider [their decision] because [the] bills' failure and a Parliament dissolution would be suicidal for (the) LDP."
But LDP Secretary General Tsutomu Takebe urged party members to prepare for a general election in case the bills are voted down.
"We must be prepared for any kind of situation we may face," Takebe said.
Japan Post, to be privatized by 2017 under the bills, is in effect the world's largest bank, with ?330 trillion (US$2.9 trillion) in savings and insurance deposits.
Koizumi argues that the postal reform is needed in order to make the trillions of dollars deposited in the postal savings system open to more efficient investment, providing a jump-start to a country that is only now emerging fitfully from a lengthy slowdown triggered by the bursting of the "bubble economy" of the 1980s.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS