Word: ldp
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...When details leaked out before the scheduled Tuesday evening release of his preliminary proposals, those grumblings turned into a revolt. On Tuesday morning, Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) heavyweights Mitsuo Horiuchi, Taro Aso and Taku Yamasaki vowed to intervene. While Koizumi briefed the emperor at the Imperial Palace that evening, the three leaders and other LDP bosses confronted Takenaka behind closed doors in the Diet building. Takenaka left the meeting looking visibly pale. "This was poor leadership from Koizumi," says Mamoru Yamazaki, chief economist at Barclays Capital Management. "Takenaka was accused by the leading politicians of the Diet, and the Prime...
...reason for the official silence is that Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), in power almost continuously since 1955, is beholden to nationalistic groups such as the million-strong Shrine Association, which represents Japan's 80,000 Shinto shrines. This staunchly conservative organization, which opposes compensating sex slaves and other victims of Japan's aggression, continues to insist that Japan fought on foreign soil to liberate its neighbors from Western colonialism. Nearly half of the LDP members in Japan's parliament routinely attend Shrine Association events or accept its donations, according to Nobunao Tanaka, author of two books critical...
...have to build more roads," he says, explaining that a new road would encourage development at the district's nano-technology research center, an earlier pork-barrel project. Besides, Yamaguchi needs to show the folks back home that he can be as effective as his predecessor, a veteran LDP power broker: "I have to show that even though I am not in the LDP, I can deliver," he says...
...reforms are being nibbled to death, the victims of both local politics, as in Yamaguchi's case, and Japan's powerful factions and their heavyweight constituents. As for highway construction projects, Koizumi actually won approval to privatize the state-run companies that oversee road building. But members of the LDP, pushed by their construction company patrons, demanded assurances that the fate of each of the more than 2,000 proposed projects will be voted on by the Diet, one by one, which means that most of these roads to nowhere will be quid pro quo'd into existence. "This...
...Koizumi's vision was to reorganize the way government is run, muscling up the executive branch and tearing apart the so-called iron triangle of vested interests?the LDP; their financial and vote-getting supporters in agriculture, construction and other industries; and the bureaucrats. Because the LDP has essentially run Japan as a one-party fiefdom since the mid-1950s, real power broking has gone on inside the party, among rival factions and behind closed doors. "The LDP does its real work in the dark," says Taro Kono, a young LDP Lower House member. Under Koizumi's plan, the factions...