Free Republic

TOKYO - Japanese prime minister Yukio Hatoyama has said he intends to resign, a media report said Wednesday. Public broadcaster NHK said that Hatoyama told his party executives he intended to step down over his broken campaign promise to move a U.S. Marine base off the southern island of Okinawa.

JAPAN-POLITICS/HATOYAMA-OZAWA (URGENT, REPEAT) Tue Jun 1, 2010 9:19pm EDT RPT-Japan PM Hatoyama says to resign, Ozawa to quit TOKYO June 2 (Reuters) - Unpopular Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama said on Wednesday he would resign, as the ruling party struggles to revive its chances in an upper house election expected in July. He said ruling party kingpin Ichiro Ozawa would also resign from the party's No.2 post.

A leading Japanese politician espouses a 9/11 fantasy Monday, March 8, 2010; A12 YUKIHISA FUJITA is an influential member of the ruling Democratic Party of Japan. As chief of the DPJ's international department and head of the Research Committee on Foreign Affairs in the upper house of Japan's parliament, to which he was elected in 2007, he is a Brahmin in the foreign policy establishment of Washington's most important East Asian ally. He also seems to think that America's rendering of the events of Sept. 11, 2001, is a gigantic hoax. Mr. Fujita's ideas about the attack on the World...

Fukushima Mizuho (Hatoyama's Minister of State for Consumer Affairs and Food Safety, Social Affairs, and Gender Equality) The SDPJ boss hasn’t always been so chummy with the DPJ. She once said, “The LDP and the DPJ are only as different as curry rice and rice curry.” Now that she’s part of the government headed by the latter, it would seem that she has developed a more discriminating palate. She and husband Kaido Yuichi are both attorneys. Ms. Fukushima has focused on radical feminist causes, and she’s written three books on sexual harassment and domestic violence. She’s also written another called...

Change Comes to Japan by: Brittany Fortier, September 24, 2009 Change has come to Japan, according to a panel hosted by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) on September 2, 2009. On August 30, 2009, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) was elected to an overwhelming margin, giving them 308 out of 480 seats in the Japanese House of Representatives. The DPJ and its allies, the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and the People’s New Party (PNP) have a combined total of 318 out of 480 seats, giving them a solid two-thirds majority in the House. The Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) now...

JAPAN'S Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) picked Taro Aso as its leader a year ago in the hope he would turn around its sagging fortunes and preserve its five-decade grip on power. Instead, he led the conservative, pro-business LDP to a historic defeat in a general election yesterday. Aso said he took responsibility for the loss after media projections showed the LDP had shed two-thirds of its seats in the lower house election, adding the party should pick a successor soon. After Mr Aso became the party's fourth leader in four years last September

The Democratic Party of Japan won the Lower House election by a landslide Sunday and was poised to grab more than 300 seats in the 480-seat chamber. The victory by the main opposition party would end more than half a century of almost uninterrupted rule by the Liberal Democratic Party. It would also usher in DPJ President Yukio Hatoyama, 62, as the new prime minister by mid-September. As of 11:40 p.m., the DPJ-led opposition camp had already secured 296 seats against just 100 for the LDP-New Komeito ruling bloc, early results from Kyodo said. Flush with victory, DPJ executives started...

The jobless rate rose to an all-time high of 5.7 percent in July, government data showed Friday, dealing a further blow to Prime Minister Taro Aso's already embattled government just two days before Sunday's Lower House election. The jobless rate hit a seasonally adjusted 5.7 percent, the highest level in the postwar era and worsening from 5.4 percent in June, the Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry said. The previous record was 5.5 percent, last seen in April 2003. Japan's jobless rate has been rising every month since January's 4.1 percent. The total number of jobless in July jumped 40.2 percent...