Kōichi Yamamoto

Kōichi Yamamoto, 2016

Kōichi Yamamoto ( Japanese. 山 本 公 一 , Yamamoto Kōichi ; born September 4, 1947 in Uwajima in Ehime Prefecture ) is a Japanese politician, a member of the lower house for the 4th constituency of Ehime and since 2016 environment minister in the reorganized Abe third cabinet . He belongs to the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), including the Tanigaki faction .

Yamamoto, the son of the entrepreneur, member of the House of Commons and Mayor of Uwajima Tomoichi Yamamoto , studied at the economics faculty of the Keiō University and then became an employee of the ferry company Kansai Kisen . In 1973 he moved to his father's shipping company, Seiun Kisen . From 1981 he was chairman of the board there. Later he also took over board positions in the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Uwajima and the Keizai Dōyūkai (another of the three major business associations) of Ehime.

Yamamoto entered active politics in 1991 when he ran successfully in the Ehime prefectural parliamentary election (part of the unified elections ). As early as 1993 he resigned in order to stand in the lower house election in the then three- mandate constituency Ehime 3 as the successor to Isamu Imai (LDP, Miyazawa faction ), who withdrew from politics in 1993. From scratch, Yamamoto was elected with the highest share of the vote (31%) ahead of the re-elected incumbents Mamoru Nishida (LDP, Obuchi faction ) with 27% and Tsunetoshi Tanaka (SPJ) with 21%. After the introduction of the single-mandate constituencies, he has been running since 1996 in the new constituency 4, which he won seven times in a row up to and including 2014.

From 1997 to 1998 ( Hashimoto II Cabinet (reshuffle) ) Yamamoto was political state secretary ( seimu jikan ) in the environmental agency under Minister Hiroshi Ōki . In the "Katō rebellion" in 2000 against the party chairman Yoshirō Mori, he remained loyal to Katō and abstained from the vote of no confidence in the Mori cabinet by absenteeism, later he followed after the temporary reunification of the faction Katō's successor Sadakazu Tanigaki in his renewed split. From 2004 to 2005 ( Koizumi II Cabinet (reshuffle) ), Yamamoto was Secretary of State ( fuku-daijin ) for General Affairs . He chaired several committees of the House of Commons: from 2003 to 2004 in the Cabinet Committee, from 2009 to 2010 in the Special Committee for Okinawa and the “Northern Territories” (South Kuril Islands), from 2012 to 2014 in the Committee on Foundations of National Policy ( kokka kihon seisaku iinkai ; not an ordinary legislative committee, but to a certain extent an institutionalized general debate in a small circle, set up in 2001; the party chairmen's debate takes place in a joint meeting of the basic committees of both chambers ) and in 2016 in the special ethics committee. In August 2016, Shinzō Abe appointed him environment minister and cabinet minister for the nuclear power disaster protection conference established in 2012 during a cabinet reshuffle .

Web links

• Website (japanese)
• House of Commons: MP, Yamamoto Kōichi (Japanese)
• Kantei : Minister in the third cabinet, which has been transformed for the second time, Abe, Yamamoto Kōichi (Japanese, English , Chinese )