Kan Suzuki

Kan Suzuki

Kan Suzuki ( Japanese 鈴木 寛 , Suzuki Kan ; born February 5, 1964 in Akashi , Hyōgo Prefecture ) is a Japanese politician. From 2001 to 2013, as a member of the Democratic Party , he represented Tokyo Prefecture in Sangiin , the upper house, for two terms .

Suzuki graduated from Tokyo University in 1986 with a law degree and then became a civil servant at MITI . During his civil servant career, he worked, among other things, for the authority for raw materials and energy and the land authority and undertook a research stay at the University of Sydney . In 1999 he left the ministry for good and took up teaching at Keiō University .

In the 2001 Sangiin election , Suzuki stood for the Democratic Party in the Tokyo constituency (then four, since 2007 five seats), achieved the third highest percentage of votes and became a member of parliament. In 2005 and 2006 Suzuki was a member of the shadow cabinets of Seiji Maehara and Ichirō Ozawa . In the Sangiin he was a member of the Committee on Education, Culture, Sport, Science and Technology, the Judiciary Committee and the Constitutional Research Committee. In 2007 he was re-elected as a member of Parliament - again with the third highest percentage of votes.

After the Democrats came to power after the Shūgiin election in 2009 , Suzuki became State Secretary for Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology in the Hatoyama Cabinet , and in 2010 in the Kan Cabinet .

Before the Sangiin election in 2013 , the Democratic Party made a very short-term decision to nominate only one of its two previous incumbents as a candidate for re-election in view of the reduced support. The choice fell on Suzuki, although the prominent member of the DPJ Tokyo Naoto Kan supported her counterpart Masako Ōkawara , who ran as an independent candidate after the party nomination was withdrawn. As a result, the party lost both seats, and the LDP won two seats in Tokyo for the first time since the 1986 election. Suzuki achieved the sixth highest share of the vote with just under 10%, Ōkawara landed in ninth place with around four percent of the votes.

In November 2013 he left the Democratic Party.

Web links

• Official Website (Japanese)
• Sangiin: 議員 情報 (Japanese), List of the Members (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Ayako Mie: DPJ in disarray, faults Kan for poll disaster. Unity eludes; ex-member Hatoyama also draws scorn. In: The Japan Times . July 24, 2013, accessed August 22, 2013 . 
2. ↑ 民主 元 議員 の 離 党 相 次 ぐ 鈴木 寛 、 津 島 氏 . (No longer available online.) In: Fukui Shimbun Online. November 19, 2013, archived from the original on March 8, 2017 ; Retrieved March 7, 2017 (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.