Kōichirō Watanabe

Kōichirō Watanabe ( Japanese 渡 辺 浩 一郎 , Watanabe Kōichirō ; born May 31, 1944 in Tokyo Prefecture ) is a Japanese politician. He was a member of the Shūgiin , the lower house of the Japanese parliament , from Tokyo Prefecture from 1993 to 1996 and from 2009 to 2012 .

Watanabe graduated from the Nihon Daigaku Faculty of Engineering in 1968 with a degree in architecture . After two years of research at the Tokyo University's Department of Urban Planning , he worked for Taisei Kensetsu . In 1974 he passed the state examination as "first class architect" ( ikkyū kenchikushi ). In 1979 he acquired his doctorate at Nihon Daigaku and then worked for the then Tōkyō-to kaiyō kankyō hozen kyōkai ( 東京 都 海洋 環境 保全 協会 , "Society for Marine Environmental Protection of the Tokyo Prefecture").

In 1990 Watanabe became secretary to MP Hirohisa Fujii . In the Shūgiin election in 1993 he ran for the New Japan Party (NJP) in the four-mandate constituency Tokyo 7 and was elected to Shūgiin for the first time with the second highest share of the vote behind Naoto Kan ( Shaminren ). He then took over the chairmanship of the General Assembly of NJP MPs from both chambers. In the party reshuffles of the 1990s, Watanabe Ichirō Ozawa followed in the New Progress Party , then the Liberal Party , for which he lost the new constituency Tokyo 19 to Yoshinori Suematsu (DPJ) in the 1996 and 2000 elections. In 2002, when the Liberal Party joined the DPJ, he himself became a member of the DPJ, including the Ozawa group , for which he took the candidacy in the 11th constituency of Tokyo, but which Hakubun Shimomura ( LDP ) defended sovereignly in the 2003 and 2005 elections. It was not until the DPJ landslide victory in 2009 , when Watanabe no longer ran in a constituency, that he moved into Shūgiin a second time via the Tokyo proportional representation.

In February 2011, he and 15 other supporters of Ozawa announced that they were leaving the DPJ Shūgiin faction. Together they wanted to put pressure on the party leadership not to take disciplinary action against Ozawa. They initially remained party members, but founded their own group under Watanabe's chairmanship, the Minshutō Seiken Kōtai ni Sekinin o motsu Kai (German: "Assembly that takes responsibility for the takeover of government by the Democratic Party"), and threatened the budget laws for the im April 2011 fiscal year beginning to block - because of the "twisted parliament" and the negative attitude of the opposition, the government needs a two-thirds majority in the Shūgiin to pass laws (not the budget itself), which it could achieve together with the SDP without the 16 Ozawa supporters certainly missed it.

In December 2011 Watanabe left the party together with other supporters of Ozawa for good, in the Shinto Kizuna Watanabe was general secretary. In 2012, the party became part of the Nippon Mirai no Tō Ozawas before the 2012 Shūgiin election . Watanabe ran for this candidate in the 19th constituency of Tokyo, but received only 7.6% of the votes and was therefore disqualified for re-election via proportional representation.

Web links

• Official Website (Japanese)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Punish Ozawa at your peril: 16 DPJ allies. Loyalists shun group, hint veto of budget bills. In: The Japan Times . February 18, 2011, accessed February 19, 2011 .