Yoriko Kawaguchi

Secretary of State Kawaguchi on a visit to Washington in September 2002.

Yoriko Kawaguchi ( Japanese 川口 順子 , Kawaguchi Yoriko ; born January 14, 1941 in Tokyo ) is a Japanese politician of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP, no faction ) and former minister. From 2005 to 2013 she was a member of the Sangiin , the Japanese upper house.

biography

Kawaguchi studied international relations at Tokyo University . After graduating ( BA ) in 1965, she became a civil servant at MITI . In 1972 she earned a Masters in Economics from Yale University . From 1976 to 1990 she worked at the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development . She then returned to MITI for a few months before being sent to the Japanese Embassy in the United States as a minister ( taishikan kōshi ) . In 1992 she came back to MITI as Deputy General Director ( kambō shingikan ) for global environmental issues. A year later she left the ministry for good and became a director of the beverage company Suntory .

Prime Minister Yoshirō Mori appointed Kawaguchi in 2001 as head of the environmental agency in his second cabinet . Under her leadership, the agency was transformed into a ministry during the restructuring of the central government in January 2001. Jun'ichirō Koizumi initially took her over as Environment Minister in his cabinet and appointed her Foreign Minister after Makiko Tanaka's dismissal in early 2002. In 2004 she was replaced by Nobutaka Machimura , and Kawaguchi became special advisor to the Prime Minister for Foreign Affairs. In the fall of 2005, she gave up her post and was elected in the 2005 by-election in Kanagawa Prefecture for the resigned Sangiin MP Tsuyoshi Saitō with around 400,000 votes ahead of the DPJ candidate Hiroe Akiyama . In the Sangiin election in 2007 , Kawaguchi was re -elected with 261,404 preferential votes and thus 5th place on the LDP list via the national proportional representation. In 2008, she became chair of the International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament , along with former Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans . In 2012 she took over the chairmanship of the Sangiin Environmental Committee. In May 2013, the opposition majority in Sangiin passed a resolution to dismiss them after they extended a visit to China without consulting parliament and missed a scheduled committee meeting.

For the 2013 Sangiin election , she announced her withdrawal from politics and no longer ran for re-election.

Web links

• Official Website (Japanese)
• Brief CV at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (English)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Opposition seeks to oust LDP lawmaker as committee chair. In: The Japan Times . May 8, 2013, accessed May 9, 2013 . 
2. ^ Ayako Mie: Opposition guns for LDP committee chair. Procedural error gives opening to oust Kawaguchi. In: The Japan Times . May 9, 2013, accessed May 9, 2013 . 
3. ^ Reiji Yoshida: Opposition gets LDP scalp in Upper House. In: The Japan Times . May 9, 2013, accessed May 9, 2013 . 
4. ↑ 平 田 参 院 議長 、 川口 元 外相 ら 引退 ・ 不 出馬 ２８ 人 . In: Yomiuri Shimbun . July 4, 2013, Retrieved August 21, 2013 (Japanese).