Keishu Tanaka

Keishū Tanaka, 2011

Keishū Tanaka ( Japanese 田中 慶 秋 , Tanaka Keishū ; born March 6, 1938 in Namie , Fukushima Prefecture ) is a Japanese politician. Between 1983 and 2012 he was a member of the Shūgiin , the lower house of the national parliament, from Kanagawa , most recently as a member of the Democratic Party ( ex-DSP group ). In 2012 he was Minister of Justice for several weeks in the reorganized Noda cabinet .

Tanaka graduated from the engineering faculty of Tōkai University in 1960 and was employed by Koito Kōgyō (now: KI Holdings ) in Yokohama (Kanagawa) in 1961 , where he was active in the union. He switched to politics in the 1971 general election in Kanagawa , in which he was elected to the prefectural parliament for the first of three consecutive terms.

In the 1983 Shūgiin election , Tanaka switched to national politics: he ran for the Democratic Socialist Party (DSP) in the four-mandate Kanagawa 4 constituency as the successor to the deceased DSP MP Takamochi Takahashi . With the third highest percentage of votes, he moved into the Shūgiin and was re-elected in 1986. In the 1990 election, the Liberal Democratic Party and the Socialist Party of Japan each nominated two instead of one candidate in the 4th constituency of Kanagawa; Tanaka achieved only the sixth highest share of the vote and left parliament. In 1993 the constituency was enlarged to five seats, but again it only received the sixth highest percentage of votes.

Like most DSP members, Tanaka joined the New Progressive Party (NFP) in 1994 , for which he ran after the electoral reform in the new single-mandate Kanagawa 5 constituency . In the Shūgiin election in 1996 , he moved against a Liberal Democrat, a Democrat and a Communist again in parliament. After the dissolution of the NFP he came 1998 on the "New Brüderlichkeitspartei" of Kansei Nakano to the Democratic Party. For this he was able to defend his constituency in 2000, 2003 and 2009 - only in the “post-privatization election” in 2005 he was defeated by the Liberal Democrat Manabu Sakai and with a poor constituency result also missed a re-election in the proportional representation. Within the Democratic Party, he is one of the leading politicians of the Kawabata Group, the faction around former DSP members, in which he has also been the formal chairman since 2005.

After the democratic election victory in 2009 Tanaka took over the chairmanship of the cabinet committee of the Shūgiin, in 2010 the chairmanship of the economic committee. In 2011 he became one of the party's vice- chairmen under the new party chairman Yoshihiko Noda . On October 1, 2012 he succeeded Makoto Taki as Minister of Justice during a restructuring of the party leadership and cabinet and was also given responsibility for the "kidnapping issue" . Shortly after he took office as minister, a (generally prohibited) political donation from a foreigner and the fact that he had arranged the wedding of a yakuza gang leader 30 years ago became public. Just three weeks after his appointment as Minister of Justice, he resigned from his position, officially on "health grounds".

In the Shūgiin election in 2012 Tanaka was voted out: He lost the constituency Kanagawa 5 with 11.5% as fourth-placed candidate to Manabu Sakai, on the proportional representation list of the Democrats in South Kantō he ended up in 24th, fourth from last place - at four proportional representation mandates for the party.

Web links

• Official Website (Japanese)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Justice minister got Chinese donation. In: The Japan Times . October 5, 2012, accessed October 15, 2012 . 
2. ↑ New justice minister allegedly had yakuza ties. In: The Japan Times . October 12, 2012, accessed October 15, 2012 . 
3. ^ Justice chief claims all mob ties cut. Tanaka stays put, says yakuza encounters in past were surprise. In: The Japan Times . October 13, 2012, accessed October 15, 2012 . 
4. ↑ In league with the Yakuza: Japan's Justice Minister resigns n-tv, October 23, 2012