Ichirō Ozawa

Ichirō Ozawa

Ichirō Ozawa ( Japanese 小 沢 一郎 , Ozawa Ichirō , born May 24, 1942 in Shitaya (today: Taitō ), Tokyo ) is a Japanese politician ( LDP → JRP → NFP → LP → DPJ → LF → Mirai → Seikatsu → LP → DVP ) and MP in the Shūgiin , the lower house of the national parliament , for the 4th constituency of Iwate . In theOnce General Secretary of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), when he left in 1993 he helped to trigger the LDP's first loss of power. In the 1990s he was one of the leading politicians in the restructuring of the party landscape and at times led, among other things, two large parties that were supposed to end the LDP government, which was restored in 1994, the New Progress Party (NFP), which temporarily gathered large parts of the fragmented opposition , and the Democratic Party (DPJ). The latter was actually able to force the LDP into the opposition in 2009; but Ozawa, who had recently resigned from the party leadership, came into conflict with the party leadership several times and was hit by scandals. In 2012 he left the DPJ in opposition to the VAT hike by party chairman Yoshihiko Noda . From January 2013 to April 2019 he was (since 2015: Co-) chairman of the Liberal Party (until 2016 Seikatsu no Tō ).

life and career

Promotion in the LDP

Kakuei Tanaka (left) and Ozawa (1970s)

Ozawa is the eldest son of longtime MP and Minister Saeki Ozawa . After graduating from Keio University , he continued his law studies at the Graduate School of Nihon University . In 1969, however, his father died. At the age of 27, Ozawa was elected to the Shūgiin as a member of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) for the then 2nd constituency of Iwate Prefecture . Ozawa joined the Tanaka faction of the then General Secretary Kakuei Tanaka .

In 1985 he was Interior Minister and Chairman of the National Public Safety Commission in the second Cabinet of Yasuhiro Nakasone . During his term of office, the plans for the introduction of a sales tax fell . In the aftermath of the Lockheed scandal that had discredited Tanaka, Ozawa left the Tanaka faction in 1985 and was involved in the founding of the Keiseikai (Takeshita, later Obuchi faction) of Noboru Takeshita and Shin Kanemaru . Ozawa rose to the ranks of the new strongest LDP faction. From 1989 to 1991 he was General Secretary of the LDP.

Reconstruction of the party landscape

In 1989 the recruit scandal shook the LDP and led to the resignation of Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita, his successor Sōsuke Uno resigned after a few months and Toshiki Kaifu , who fought against corruption, could not prevail against the factions and resigned in 1991. In 1992 Morihiro Hosokawa left the party and founded the New Japan Party , which received seven percent of the vote in the upper house elections that year. During the Sagawa Kyūbin scandal in the same year, faction leader Kanemaru also came under criticism. Ozawa, who was considered number two in the faction despite his comparatively young age, was defeated by the more experienced Keizo Obuchi , who enjoyed the support of Takeshita, in the struggle to succeed Kanemarus . Tsutomu Hata and Ozawa left the faction with their supporters and founded their own group, the Kaikaku Forum 21 (Hata Ozawa faction).

In 1993 Ozawa and Hata finally left the scandal-ridden LDP and founded the Shinseitō (Renewal Party). As a result of this split in the LDP, the party lost its participation in government for the first time since it was founded and after the Shūgiin election in 1993 no longer provided the prime minister. As General Secretary of the Renewal Party, Ozawa was instrumental in the coalition negotiations for the resulting anti-LDP coalition. After the return of the LDP to power, the Shinseitō went to the Shinshintō (New Progressive Party), which he led from 1995 as party leader.

Opposition leader and "shadow shogun"

After the dissolution of the Shinshinto in 1998, Ozawa founded the Liberal Party , which formed a government coalition with the LDP between 1999 and 2000. In 2003 the Liberal Party joined the DPJ, which had developed into the largest opposition party. Together with the DPJ party founders Yukio Hatoyama and Naoto Kan , Ozawa formed the so-called Troika , which repeatedly shared the leading party offices.

When the DPJ party leader Seiji Maehara resigned after a short term in office in the wake of the Livedoor scandal, Ichirō Ozawa was elected on April 7, 2006 as his successor. Under his leadership, the party won the upper house elections in July 2007 . Ozawa offered to resign on November 4, 2007 after negotiating a grand coalition with Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda , which his party rejected. Three days later, at a press conference, he announced that he would remain party leader and not seek a grand coalition, but rather try to achieve a majority change in the next general election.

On September 8, 2008, Ozawa was confirmed as party leader for another two years without a vote after no opposing candidates were available for a possible election. An extraordinary party congress confirmed this decision on September 21, 2008.

In March 2009, a scandal about illegal donations by the construction company Nishimatsu Kensetsu became known, in which besides the LDP politicians Toshihiro Nikai , Kōji Omi and Yoshirō Mori also Ozawa and in particular his arrested secretary Takanori Ōkubo were involved. In the run-up to the 2009 general election , parts of the Democrats fear that the scandal could jeopardize a possible election victory against Prime Minister Tarō Asō and called for Ozawa's resignation. On May 11, 2009, Ozawa announced his resignation from the party leadership at a press conference. He remained in office until Hatoyama's successor was elected. He took political responsibility for the scandal, but stressed his personal innocence. He ruled out resigning his seat as a member of parliament or leaving the party.

With the Democratic Party as government politician

Hatoyama and Ozawa on the evening of the 2009 Shūgiin election

The following important information is still missing in the following paragraph:

from 2010–2012: suspension, trial (s) & "intra-party opposition"

Help Wikipedia by researching and pasting it .

After the DPJ's victory in the Shūgiin election in 2009 , Hatoyama appointed him as general secretary, while Naoto Kan was deputy prime minister. As in the anti-LDP cabinets of the early 1990s, Ozawa was seen as a key figure in government cohesion. He was therefore also referred to by the western media as the “shadow shogun” of Japanese politics.

In a scandal known as the "Rikuzankai Case" ( 陸 山 会 事件 , Rikuzankai Jiken ) over a land purchase by Ozawa's support organization Rikuzankai , three former Ozawa employees were arrested in January 2010: Tomohiro Ishikawa , Mitsutomo Ikeda and Takanori Ōkubo . The investigation against Ozawa himself was initially set; However, a kensatsu-shinsakai ( 検 察 審査 会 , "Supervisory Commission of the Public Prosecutor's Office"; acts upon request to review decisions of the public prosecutor) ordered the resumption of the investigations in April 2010. Another kensatsu-shinsakai ordered a coercive charge against Ozawa in October 2010. Ozawa in turn considered suing this decision himself. In addition, the opposition wanted to invite Ozawa to a parliamentary hearing ( shōnin kammon ). At first Ozawa refused further parliamentary inquiries, as he would prove his innocence anyway in the upcoming trial. In December 2010, however, under pressure from the Democratic Party and its affiliated unions, he agreed to a hearing before a seiji rinri shinsakai ( 政治 倫理 審査 会 , seirinshin for short ), a parliamentary ethics investigation committee, which, however, differs from a shōnin-kammon -Hearing no swearing takes place. Ozawa was finally officially indicted in January 2011 and acquitted in April 2012 by the Tokyo District Court ( 東京 地方 裁判 所 Tōkyō Chihō Saibansho ) after Ishikawa, Ikeda and Ōkubo were sentenced to prison terms in September 2011 for falsifying financial reports on political donations in the Rikuzankai case . According to the court, however, there was no evidence that Ozawa ordered his secretaries to act illegally. In February 2011, Ozawa had also been expelled from the DPJ after being charged with the district court in order to prevent the already poor poll numbers from falling further. Ozawa had refused a request from Prime Minister and party chairman Kan to leave the party voluntarily. After the acquittal, the suspension was lifted.

Following Yukio Hatoyama's resignation as party chairman and prime minister in June 2010, Naoto Kan took over both offices, and the “troika system” ( Toroika taisei ) was dissolved: Ozawa resigned the office of general secretary, Yukio Edano succeeded him. The upper house election in June 2010 ended with the loss of the majority in a heavy defeat for the Democrats. On September 14, Ozawa ran against incumbent Prime Minister Naoto Kan to elect the DP chairman , but was clearly unlikely to vote in the battle vote with 491 to 721 points, with party members and registered supporters in particular opting for Kan and 249 out of 300 Majority of constituencies voted for Kan. However, Ozawa also lost 40 to 60 among local MPs and 200 to 206 votes among national MPs.

Renewed opposition

In the House of Commons vote in June 2012 on the law to double the VAT, Ozawa, along with over 50 Democratic MPs, voted against the bill. In the 2009 election campaign, the Democratic Party promised not to increase VAT in the coming legislative period. Thirty-six of the MPs who had voted no and twelve Democratic upper house MPs submitted their resignation together with Ozawa, which was accepted by the party leadership in the upper house MPs and answered with expulsion from the lower house MPs. The delegates gathered in the Kokumin no Seikatsu ga Daiichi under Ozawa's leadership. The name took up a campaign slogan of the Democratic Party from 2009.

For the Shūgiin election in 2012 , the party joined forces with other opponents of the VAT hike , possible entry into the TPP and nuclear power to form the Nippon Mirai no Tō ("Future Party of Japan"), chaired by Yukiko Kada , governor of Shiga. The party lost most of its seats. Ozawa himself lost significantly in the constituency of Iwate 4 compared to earlier elections, but defended his mandate with 45.5% of the votes and a clear lead over his three opponents. After the election, the Future Party split again; the majority of the remaining MPs joined the Seikatsu no Tō, in which Ozawa took over the party chairmanship from Yūko Mori in January 2013 . In January 2015, he joined forces with the House of Lords Taro Yamamoto and has shared the party chairmanship with him ever since. In October 2016, the Seikatsu no Tō was named after Ozawa's previous party in "Liberal Party". On April 26, 2019, the party decided to merge into the Democratic People's Party , with which it had already formed factional communities in both chambers of the national parliament a few months earlier.

Fonts

• 日本 改造 計画 (Nippon kaizō keikaku) Kōdansha 1993, ISBN 4062064820 .
  • Translated into English as: Blueprint for a New Japan: The Rethinking of a Nation. Kodansha International 1994.
• 語 る (kataru) Bungei Shunjū 1996, ISBN 4163502106 .
• 剛 腕 維新 (gōwan ishin) Kadokawa Gakugei 2006, ISBN 4046210885 .

literature

• Aurelia George Mulgan: Ozawa Ichirō and Japanese Politics . Routledge 2014, ISBN 978-1138778344 .
• Richard J. Samuels: Machiavelli's Children: Leaders And Their Legacies In Italy And Japan. Cornell University Press, 2005, ISBN 0801489822 , p. 316 ff .: Options on the Right: Umberto Bossi, Silvio Berlusconi, Ozawa Ichirō and Ishihara Shintarō.
• Jacob Schlesinger: Shadow shoguns: the rise and fall of Japan's postwar political machine. Stanford University Press, 1999, ISBN 0804734577 , p. 157 ff .: The Second Generation: The "Bubble Politics" of Shin Kanemaru, Noboru Takeshita, and Ichiro Ozawa.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Japan News Review: DPJ leader Ozawa hands in resignation over grand coalition controversy ( Memento of the original from November 9, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (English)  
2. ↑ Difficult path awaits Ozawa. In: The Japan Times Weekly. November 17, 2007, accessed June 27, 2008 . 
3. ↑ Mainichi Daily News, September 8, 2008: Ozawa re-elected to third term as DPJ leader without contest  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
4. ↑ Masami Itō: Hand-wringing over fund scandal. In: The Japan Times . March 20, 2009, accessed April 19, 2009 . 
5. ^ Key Ozawa aide arrested over illegal funds. In: The Japan Times . March 4, 2009, accessed April 19, 2009 . 
6. ^ DPJ split by Ozawa decision to stay put. Many in party critical of leader, seek his quick exit. In: The Japan Times . March 26, 2009, accessed April 19, 2009 . 
7. ^ Masami Itō: Ozawa declares resignation. Hatoyama is stepping down; Okada, Kan seen stepping up. In: The Japan Times . May 12, 2009, accessed May 12, 2009 . 
8. ↑ DPJ lawmaker held in Ozawa fund scam. Ex-aide tied to shady land buy; allies tell kingpin to come clean. In: The Japan Times . January 16, 2010, accessed January 18, 2010 . 
9. ^ Inquest: Ozawa merits indictment. Prosecutors must now reinvestigate fund reports. In: The Japan Times . April 27, 2010, accessed April 27, 2010 . 
10. ^ Ozawa Inquest Panel Rules for Indictment. DPJ don can't duck charges for '04 -'05 funds reports. In: The Japan Times . October 5, 2010, accessed October 15, 2010 . 
11. ↑ Ozawa may file suit over inquest panel. Body went beyond scope, lawyer says. In: The Japan Times . October 8, 2010, accessed October 15, 2010 . 
12. ↑ Ozawa suit looms over inquest panel decision. In: The Japan Times . October 15, 2010, accessed October 15, 2010 . 
13. ^ LDP pressures Kan for Ozawa Diet testimony. In: The Japan Times . October 7, 2010, accessed October 15, 2010 . 
14. ↑ Ozawa agrees to give unsworn testimony. DPJ don to face Diet panel, hints he wants Sengoku, Mabuchi ousted. In: The Japan Times . December 28, 2010, accessed December 28, 2010 . 
15. ↑ former Ozawa aides Judged guilty. In: The Japan Times . September 27, 2011, accessed August 24, 2018 . 
16. ^ Ozawa not guilty of fund conspiracy. In: The Japan Times . April 27, 2012, accessed August 24, 2018 . 
17. ↑ Japan DPJ Proposes suspending power broker Ozawa. In: Reuters . February 14, 2011, accessed August 24, 2018 . 
18. ↑ DPJ to discuss reinstating Ozawa's party membership. In: Reuters . February 14, 2011, accessed August 24, 2018 . 
19. ↑ Zeit online : Japan's Premier Kan wins battle vote , September 14, 2010.
20. ↑ 【民主 代表 選】 投票 総 数 で は 「６ 対 ４」 党員 党員 ・ サ ポ ー タ ー 票 . (No longer available online.) In: MSN / Sankei News. September 14, 2010, archived from the original on September 18, 2010 ; Retrieved September 15, 2010 (Japanese). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
21. ^ Hatoyama membership suspended; others warned. DPJ formally expels bolting tax hike foes. In: The Japan Times . July 4, 2012, accessed July 5, 2012 . 
22. ↑ 国民 民主党 、 自由 党 と 合併 で 正式 合意 自由 は 解散 . In: Mainichi Shimbun . April 26, 2019. Retrieved April 28, 2019 (Japanese). 
23. ^ Democratic Party for the People, Japan's second-largest opposition force, absorbs Ozawa's Liberals. In: The Japan Times . April 26, 2019, accessed April 28, 2019 . 

Web links

Commons : Ichirō Ozawa  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Official Website (Japanese)
• Profile on the Liberal Party website (Japanese)