Ritsuo Hosokawa

Ritsuo Hosokawa

Ritsuo Hosokawa ( Japanese 細 川 律 夫 , Hosokawa Ritsuo ; born August 8, 1943 in Gohoku (today: Ino ), Kōchi Prefecture ) is a former Japanese politician of the Democratic Party , former member of the Shūgiin , the lower house, for the 3rd constituency of Saitama and was Minister for Health, Labor and Social Affairs from September 2010 to September 2011 .

Hosokawa graduated from Meiji University in 1966 with a law degree , and later passed the bar exam. In 1974 he was registered with the Saitama Bar Association . In 1981 he opened a law firm in Koshigaya in eastern Saitama, for which he continued to work after entering politics. In the Shūgiin election in 1983 , he applied for a seat for the first time for the Socialist Party of Japan (SPJ) in the three-seat constituency Saitama 4, which also included Koshigaya, but ended up in fifth place behind one Kōmeitō and three LDP candidates. In the second attempt in the 1986 elections , in which the constituency received one more mandate, he missed fourth place by around 2,000 votes. It was not until the third attempt in 1990 that he became a member of parliament, where he achieved top tōsen with over 200,000 votes , that is, the election with the most votes among the constituency candidates. He was then re-elected six times in a row, after the electoral reform of 1994 in the new single constituency Saitama 3 or in the proportional electoral block North Kantō.

In 1996, Hosokawa helped found the Democratic Party, and in December of the same year he took over the chairmanship of the Saitama Prefectural Association. Later he was, among other things, responsible for North Kantō, a member of the board and belonged to several shadow cabinets of Yukio Hatoyama and Ichirō Ozawa , most recently in 2009 as "the next Minister of Justice". In the Shūgiin he chaired the Environment Committee from 1999 to 2000, and in 2005 he was a minority leader in the Budget Committee. He dealt intensively with the situation of foreign workers in Japan and worked during the "twisted parliament" 2009 with government representative Yasuhisa Shiozaki (LDP) on a bill to intensify the fight against illegal immigration. He is also an advocate of local and prefectural suffrage for foreigners .

After the democratic victory in the Shūgiin election in 2009 , in which Hosokawa himself won his constituency back with a clear result from Hiroshi Imai (LDP), he became State Secretary ( fuku-daijin , "Vice Minister") in the Ministry of Social Affairs in the government of Yukio Hatoyama called. In September, he took over the reshuffled cabinet of Naoto Kan to ministerial posts by Akira Nagatsuma , which he held until September 2 2011th

In the 2012 Shūgiin election , Hosokawa was voted out of parliament after 22 years: he lost the third Saitama constituency to Hitoshi Kikawada (LDP) and achieved fifth place with his - measured by the devastating overall result of candidates from the Democratic Party - relatively narrow constituency defeat on the list of Democrats in North Kanto. Since the party won only three of the 20 proportional representation seats with 15.1% of the proportional representation votes (in 2009 it was 42.1% and ten seats), that was not enough for re-election via the bloc. In 2014 he ran again unsuccessfully and then declared his withdrawal from active politics.

Web links

• Official Website (Japanese)
• Japan Times : Cabinet Profiles (English)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Minoru Matsutani: DPJ slams strict bills on foreign residents. In: The Japan Times . April 17, 2009, accessed September 21, 2010 . 
2. ↑ Minoru Matsutani: Controls on Foreigners. With some concessions, DPJ backs crackdown. In: The Japan Times . June 26, 2009, accessed September 21, 2010 . 
3. ↑ Minoru Matsutani: Controls on Foreigners. LDP's point man on immigration bills. Shiozaki says despite opposition, clampdown on illegals still intact. In: The Japan Times . June 26, 2009, accessed September 21, 2010 . 
4. ↑ Yomiuri Shimbun : election results Shūgiin 2014, majority election, Saitama 3