Junichiro Koizumi

Junichiro Koizumi ( 小泉 純一郎, Koizumi Jun'ichirō ; born 8 January 1942) is a Japanese retired politician who was Prime Minister of Japan and President of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) from 2001 to 2006.

Born in Yokosuka, Kanagawa on 8 January 1942, Koizumi was educated at Yokosuka High School.

He graduated with a Bachelor of Economics degree from Keio University.

He attended University College London before returning to Japan in August 1969 upon the death of his father.

He stood for election to the lower house in December; however, he did not earn enough votes to win election as a Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) representative.

In 1970, he was hired as a secretary to Takeo Fukuda, who was Minister of Finance at the time and was elected as prime minister in 1976.

In the general elections of December 1972, Koizumi was elected as a member of the Lower House for the Kanagawa 11th district.

He joined Fukuda's faction within the LDP.

Since then, he has been re-elected ten times.

Koizumi gained his first senior post in 1979 as Parliamentary Vice Minister of Finance, and his first ministerial post in 1988 as Minister of Health and Welfare under Prime Ministers Noboru Takeshita and Sōsuke Uno.

He held cabinet posts again in 1992 (Minister of Posts and Telecommunications in the Miyazawa cabinet) and 1996–1998 (Minister of Health and Welfare in the Hashimoto cabinets).

In 1994, with the LDP in opposition, Koizumi became part of a new LDP faction, Shinseiki, made up of younger and more motivated parliamentarians led by Taku Yamasaki, Koichi Kato and Koizumi, a group popularly dubbed "YKK" after the zipper manufacturer YKK.

After Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa resigned in 1994 and the LDP returned to power in a coalition government, Koizumi and Hosokawa teamed up with Shusei Tanaka of New Party Sakigake in a strategic dialogue across party lines regarding Japan becoming a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council.

Although this idea was not popular within the LDP and never came to fruition, Koizumi and Hosokawa maintained a close working relationship across party lines, with Hosokawa tacitly serving as Koizumi's personal envoy to China during times of strained Sino-Japanese relations.

Koizumi competed for the presidency of the LDP in September 1995 and July 1998, but he gained little support losing decisively to Ryutaro Hashimoto and then Keizō Obuchi, both of whom had broader bases of support within the party.

However, after Yamasaki and Kato were humiliated in a disastrous attempt to force a vote of no confidence against Prime Minister Yoshirō Mori in 2000, Koizumi became the last remaining credible member of the YKK trio, which gave him leverage over the reform-minded wing of the party.

Widely seen as a maverick leader of the LDP upon his election to the position in 2001, he became known as a neoliberal economic reformer, focusing on reducing Japan's government debt and the privatisation of its postal service.

On 24 April 2001, Koizumi was elected president of the LDP.

He was initially considered an outside candidate against Hashimoto, who was running for his second term as prime minister.

However, in the first poll of prefectural party organizations, Koizumi won 87 to 11 percent; in the second vote of Diet members, Koizumi won 51 to 40 percent.

He defeated Hashimoto by a final tally of 298 to 155 votes.

He was made Prime Minister of Japan on 26 April, and his coalition secured 78 of 121 seats in the Upper House elections in July.

Within Japan, Koizumi pushed for new ways to revitalise the moribund economy, aiming to act against bad debts with commercial banks, privatize the postal savings system, and reorganize the factional structure of the LDP.

He spoke of the need for a period of painful restructuring in order to improve the future.

To design policy initiatives in 2001 he used the new Council on Economic and Fiscal Policy (Keizai Zaisei Seisaku Tanto Daijin) or CEFP.

It issued an annual planning document, "Basic Policies for Economic and Fiscal Management and Reform".

It planned a major reorganization of the central government, and shaped economic policy in cooperation with key cabinet members.

To meet the challenge of economic stagnation CEFP took an integrated approach, a worldwide economic view, and, promoted greater transparency; its philosophy was neoliberal.

Bad debts of banks were dramatically cut with the NPL ratio of major banks approaching half the level of 2001.

The Japanese economy has been through a slow but steady recovery, and the stock market has dramatically rebounded.

In the fall of 2002, Koizumi appointed Keio University economist and frequent television commentator Heizō Takenaka as Minister of State for Financial Services and head of the Financial Services Agency (FSA) to fix the country's banking crisis.

In the 2005 election, Koizumi led the LDP to win one of the largest parliamentary majorities in modern Japanese history.

Koizumi also attracted international attention through his deployment of the Japan Self-Defense Forces to Iraq, and through his visits to the Yasukuni Shrine that fueled diplomatic tensions with neighbouring China and South Korea.

Koizumi resigned as prime minister in 2006.

He retired from politics in 2009.

He is the sixth-longest serving Prime Minister in Japanese history.

Although Koizumi maintained a low profile for several years after he left office, he returned to national attention in 2013 as an advocate for abandoning nuclear power in Japan, in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, which contrasted with the pro-nuclear views espoused by the LDP governments both during and after Koizumi's term in office.

Koizumi is a third-generation politician of the Koizumi family.

His father, Jun'ya Koizumi, was director general of the Japan Defense Agency (now Minister of Defense) and a member of the House of Representatives.

His grandfather, Koizumi Matajirō, called "Tattoo Minister" because of a large tattoo on his body, was Minister of Posts and Telecommunications under Prime Ministers Hamaguchi and Wakatsuki and an early advocate of postal privatization.