Katsuya Okada

Katsuya Okada (2010)

Katsuya Okada ( Japanese 岡田 克 也 , Okada Katsuya ; born July 14, 1953 in Yokkaichi , Mie Prefecture ) is a non-party Japanese politician and member of the Shūgiin , the lower house of the national parliament , for the 3rd constituency of Mie . From 2004 to 2005 and from 2015 he was chairman of the Democratic Party , then until September 2016 chairman of the subsequent Democratic Progressive Party . In the Hatoyama , Kan andNoda was Minister from 2009 to 2010 and 2012, among other things as Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister.

Life

Career

Okada studied law at the University of Tokyo . After graduating, he became a civil servant at MITI . In 1985 he completed a graduate degree at Harvard University . At the age of 36 he was elected to parliament for the first time in the 1990 Shūgiin election for the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). Within the party, he first joined the Takeshita faction , but followed in the dispute over the reform of the political system Tsutomu Hata and Ichirō Ozawa first in the "Reform Forum 21", then in 1993 from the scandal-ridden LDP into the renewal party . After the collapse of the anti-LDP coalition in 1994, Okada belonged to the New Progress Party of Toshiki Kaifu and Ichirō Ozawa, then to the Minseitō of Tsutomu Hata and finally from 1998 to the Democratic Party.

opposition

In 2000, Okada moved up as chairman of the political research committee ( seisaku chōsakai ) in the inner circle of the DPJ party leadership. In 2002 he was defeated by Naoto Kan in the election for party chairmanship, but subsequently received the position of general secretary. When a scandal about missed payments into the state pension system in 2004 led to the resignation of the party chairman Kan and the withdrawal of the "executive chairman" ( daihyō daikō ) Ozawa, Okada was elected as Kan's successor in May 2004 with no opponent. His first big job was to lead the party into the Sangiin election on July 11, 2004 . The political opponent, the LDP, was led by the popular Prime Minister Jun'ichirō Koizumi , but was also badly affected by the pension scandal - Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuo Fukuda had even resigned. Okada's DPJ focused its election campaign on the pension system and the unpopular Iraq deployment of the self-defense forces , was able to achieve the highest percentage of votes and gain 12 seats. In the run-up to the early elections for Shūgiin in 2005 , Okada was initially considered a favorite to replace Koizumi, as the LDP appeared to be facing a split in the dispute over post-privatization. While Koizumi concentrated on the “rebels” in his own party and thus post-privatization came to the fore, the DPJ did not succeed in showing an alternative to Koizumi's economic reform course: the Democrats, who have won seats in every election since their founding lost around a third of their mandates. The day after the election, September 12, 2005, Okada resigned from the party leadership. His successor was Seiji Maehara .

Okada then took on various leadership positions in parliamentary committees and in the party, including head of the DPJ department for combating climate change and the democratic parliamentary association for nuclear disarmament. In September 2006 he returned to the party executive committee as one of the seven deputy party chairmen ( fuku-daihyō ).

minister

Okada as Secretary of State with Hillary Clinton and Stephen Smith (2009)

In May 2009 Okada ran against Yukio Hatoyama for the party chairmanship and was defeated with 95 to 124 votes by the DPJ MPs of both chambers. Hatoyama named him his successor as general secretary after the election. After the Democrats won the Shūgiin election in 2009 , Hatoyama appointed him to his cabinet as Foreign Minister . Under his successor Naoto Kan he was taken over into the new cabinet . In the second intra-party power struggle between Naoto Kan and Ichirō Ozawa in September 2010, Kan appointed Okada General Secretary of the Democratic Party, and Seiji Maehara was succeeded as Foreign Minister . Kan's successor Yoshihiko Noda replaced him in 2011 with Azuma Koshiishi , but appointed him as deputy prime minister in January 2012 (formally: "first minister-designate under Article 9 of the Cabinet Act", naikaku-hō dai-kyū-jō no daiichi jun'i shitei daijin ) and Minister of State for “renewal of administration” ( gyōsei sasshin ), “new polity ” ( atarashii kōkyō ), measures against the decline in the birth rate ( shōshika taisaku ) and promotion of gender equality ( danjo kyōdō sankaku ) in his reshaped cabinet and also transferred the responsibilities for administrative reform to him ( gyōsei kaikaku ), the integrated social security and tax reform ( shakaihoshō, zei ittai kaikaku ) and “reform of the public service” ( kōmuin seido kaikaku ).

Again in the opposition

After the resignation of Banri Kaieda after the Shūgiin election in 2014 , Okada took over the party chairmanship in the election of Kaieda's successor on January 18, 2015 , Okada narrowly prevailed against Gōshi Hosono , who led in the first ballot, and Akira Nagatsuma . In March 2016, he merged his party with the Ishin no Tō to form the Democratic Progressive Party (DFP). In the Sangiin election in 2016, however, she was defeated by the LDP, so Okada announced that she would no longer run for the rotating election of the party leader in September of that year.

After the Shūgiin election in 2017 , he and other DFP members formed the Mushozoku no Kai (“Assembly of Independents”) faction , as most of the former members had switched to the Party of Hope and the Constitutional Democratic Party (KDP) shortly before the election , and acted as group leader. When it became clear in April 2018 that the DFP would merge with the Party of Hope to form the Democratic People's Party (DVP), Okada left the DFP. With this step he wanted to contribute to the consolidation of the opposition. In January 2019 he finally joined nine other parliamentary group members of the KDP parliamentary group, as a rapprochement between the two largest opposition parties, the KDP and the DFP, became increasingly unlikely.

family

Okada comes from a traditional entrepreneurial family. His father Takuya turned a family business into the denon retail group , which is now run by Okada's older brother Motoya .

Okada's brother-in-law Seiichirō Murakami is a member of the Shūgiin from Ehime (LDP, Kōmura faction) and a former minister.

Constituency

Okada has been able to clearly win his constituency for Shūgiin, the 3rd constituency of Mie Prefecture, which also includes parts of his hometown Yokkaichi, seven times since its establishment in 1996, most recently in 2017 with 147,255 votes to 63,406 against the Liberal Democrat Yoshikazu Shimada.

Web links

Commons : Katsuya Okada  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Official Website (Japanese)
• Jim Frederick: The Diet's Rising Son. In: Time . July 18, 2004, accessed December 1, 2008 . 

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Kan wins duel with Okada, returns to helm of the DPJ. In: The Japan Times. December 11, 2002, accessed December 2, 2008 . 
2. ↑ Okada takes DPJ helmet unopposed. Pension record clean, unlike Ozawa's. In: The Japan Times. May 19, 2004, accessed December 2, 2008 . 
3. ↑ 立 民 、 岡田 氏 ら 10 人 の 会 派 入 り 承認 . In: Nihon Keizai Shimbun . January 15, 2019, Retrieved February 4, 2019 (Japanese). 

predecessor	Office	successor
Hirofumi Nakasone	Japanese Foreign Minister 2009-2010	Seiji Maehara