Shōzaburō Jimi

Shōzaburō Jimi

Shōzaburō Jimi ( Japanese 自 見 庄三郎 , Jimi Shōzaburō ; born November 5, 1945 in Kokura (today: Kitakyūshū ), Fukuoka Prefecture ) is a former Japanese politician . From 1983 to 2005 and from 2007 to 2013 he was a member of the National Parliament , first in the House of Representatives (Lower House), then in the Council House (Upper House). In the Kan and Noda Cabinets , he was Minister for the Financial Sector and Postal Reform from 2010 to 2012. From 2012 to 2013 he was chairman of the New People's Party .

Jimi completed his medical studies at Kyūshū University in 1970 , then he completed a postgraduate course there as a medical researcher and earned a doctorate . After a research stay at the Harvard School of Public Health , which began in 1980 , he returned to Kyūshū University as a lecturer in 1982 .

In the election in December 1983 to Shūgiin , the lower house, Jimi ran himself and was elected for the first time in the four-mandate 4th constituency of Fukuoka for the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) with the third highest percentage of votes. In the LDP, he joined the Nakasone faction of the then incumbent Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone . For the Shūgiin was then re-elected six times in a row, from 1996 in the single constituency Fukuoka 10 .

From the end of the 1980s Jimi held leadership positions in the party and in several cabinets: in 1989 he was parliamentary state secretary ( seimujikan ) in the land authority , in 1990 in MITI . In 1995 he took over the chairmanship of the communication committee of the Shūgiin, later in the same year the deputy chairmanship of the political research council of the LDP. A year later he was Deputy Secretary General. Prime Minister Ryūtarō Hashimoto appointed him in 1997 as Minister of Post in his second cabinet .

During the internal party dispute over the Japanese State Post in 2005, Jimi was one of the so-called "rebels", the opponents of the privatization operated by party chairman Jun'ichirō Koizumi . In the 2005 Shūgiin election prematurely initiated by Koizumi , Jimi ran as an independent and lost his constituency to the "assassin" candidate Kyōko Nishikawa . He joined Tamisuke Watanuki's New People's Party, which was formed from LDP “rebels”, and returned to parliament in the Sangiin election in 2007 via the national proportional representation: With over 117,000 preferential votes, he was first on the list and thus the only proportional representation to conquer the party. He then took over the deputy chairmanship of the party, and in 2008 also the office of chairman of the Political Research Council.

When the New People's Party lost the seats of party chairman Watanuki and general secretary Hisaoki Kamei in the 2009 Shugiin election, the new party chairman Shizuka Kamei appointed Jimi general secretary. Kamei became a minister in a coalition government with the Democratic Party , but resigned in June 2010 in a dispute over the revision of post-privatization, whereupon Prime Minister Naoto Kan appointed Jimi to succeed him as minister. Yoshihiko Noda took him over to this post in his new cabinet on September 2, 2011. He remained a minister until a cabinet reshuffle in June 2012.

In April 2012, after the fall and subsequent resignation of Shizuka Kamei, Jimi took over the chairmanship of the New People's Party, which he held until the party was dissolved in spring 2013. In the 2013 Sangiin election , Jimi no longer ran for another term as MP.

Web links

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

Individual evidence

1. ↑ JANJAN, The Senkyo: Sangiin election 2007, proportional representation New People's Party ( memento of the original from July 23, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.