Yōichi Masuzoe

Masuzoe ran for Governor of Tokyo in the 1999 election, placing third among nineteen candidates (behind Shintaro Ishihara and Kunio Hatoyama).[6]

He won his first National Diet seat in the Upper House in 2001 with the largest number of ballots in the national proportional representation section of the House of Councilors.[7] His main election promise was to change the Bank of Japan's policies by reforming the Bank of Japan Law. However, in May 2001 the book Princes of the Yen (『円の支配者』) on the Bank of Japan, by Richard Werner, became a number one general bestseller, and Masuzoe agreed with its conclusion that to end the recession and avoid future banking disasters and credit-driven boom-bust cycles, the Bank of Japan Law had to change to make the central bank more accountable for its policies.[8] Masuzoe won with a landslide victory – presaging the same platform, policy recommendation and landslide victory enjoyed by Shinzō Abe in the election that was to make him prime minister in late 2012. After his victory in 2001, Masuzoe duly formed the LDP BoJ Law Reform Group and appointed Professor Werner as its advisor.[9] It included the members of the Lower House Yoshimi Watanabe and Kozo Yamamoto, among others.

In 2006, he was named deputy director general of an LDP committee charged with redrafting the Constitution of Japan. In this role, he argued that Article 9 of the Constitution of Japan, which prohibits Japan from maintaining warmaking potential, was increasingly disjoined from the reality of Japan's defense arrangements, and should be revised to allow the Japan Self-Defense Forces to have the status of a military.[10]

In August 2007, Masuzoe was appointed as Minister of Health, Labour and Welfare. He served in this position until 2009 under three consecutive prime ministers (Shinzō Abe, Yasuo Fukuda and Tarō Asō).[3] Abe reportedly appointed Masuzoe, a frequent critic of Abe's policies, to silence critics who would call him a factionalist.[4] Masuzoe came under fire during his tenure for an incident in which the government failed to match 50 million pension records with their owners, which led Democratic Party of Japan head Ichirō Ozawa to call for Masuzoe's censure if he did not apologize.[11]

As MHLW minister, Masuzoe was the first Japanese government official to set forth a timetable for the settlement of lawsuits against the state for hepatitis C infections caused by tainted blood transfusions, and started an internal investigation regarding the ministry's previous responses to the issue.[12] The plaintiffs rejected his settlement proposal in December 2007, which placed strain on the Fukuda government's approval ratings.[13]

Masuzoe set up a study group within the LDP in early 2010 to study economic reforms similar to those begun by Prime Minister Junichirō Koizumi.[14]

By early 2010, Masuzoe had become an extremely popular political figure, with opinion polls suggesting that he was the public's most favored prime ministerial candidate by a wide margin. In a Kyodo News poll in March 2010, 23.7% of respondents named him as the best candidate for prime minister, compared to only 8.3% who chose second-ranked incumbent prime minister Yukio Hatoyama.[15] The Liberal Democratic Party at the same time had incurred a massive general election defeat in August 2009, and its approval ratings continued to plummet following the election of Sadakazu Tanigaki as party president in September 2009.[16]

In April 2010, Masuzoe left the LDP and formed a splinter group called New Renaissance Party (Shintō Kaikaku). The party's platform included a call for decentralization, deregulation, and a halving of the number of Diet members. At the time, The Economist's Banyan column dubbed Masuzoe "Japan's most popular politician".[17] Both the NRP and Your Party, led by ex-LDP lawmaker Yoshimi Watanabe, were viewed at the time as potentially effective center-right counterweights to the Democratic Party of Japan, and possibly even successors to the LDP itself.[16] Masuzoe's party nonetheless gained minimal traction. Four of its initial six Upper House members were voted out in the July 2010 election, leaving the party with only Masuzoe and Hiroyuki Arai representing it in the Upper House; the NRP was ultimately overshadowed by Your Party as a reformist element.[18]

LDP secretary-general Nobuteru Ishihara indicated in October 2010 that Masuzoe would run as a candidate in the 2011 Tokyo gubernatorial election, which Masuzoe emphatically denied, stating that he would serve out the remainder of his term in the House of Councillors.[19] In December 2010, he met with Ichirō Ozawa, Yukio Hatoyama and Kunio Hatoyama, reportedly to discuss a potential political realignment within the ruling Democratic Party of Japan following the resignation of Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshito Sengoku.[20] He continued to be critical of the DPJ administration under Naoto Kan in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, saying that "the government has failed to disclose information thoroughly and, secondly, it has created a confusing array of committees and organizations".[21]

Masuzoe made efforts in foreign relations as head of the NRP. He met with Chinese state councilor Dai Bingguo in March 2011 following the resignation of Foreign Minister Seiji Maehara to reassure the Chinese government about Japan's stability.[22] He traveled to Taiwan in October 2011 as part of a trilateral security dialogue between Taiwan, Japan and the United States,[23] and met with Tang Jiaxuan in Beijing in April 2013 as part of an effort to improve strained Sino-Japanese relations following the nationalization of the Senkaku Islands.[24]

Masuzoe was reportedly considered for a cabinet position under Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda in January 2012, but was passed over. On 18 January, he dissolved his alliance with the Sunrise Party of Japan led by Takeo Hiranuma. Later that month, the Asahi Shimbun proclaimed that he had "dropped off the political radar".[18]

In a September 2012 column, Masuzoe was critical of Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda's "succession of failures on both the domestic and foreign policy fronts", and was also critical of incoming LDP president Shinzō Abe, writing: "Wariness of Abe on the Korean and Chinese sides would make an improvement in relations increasingly difficult. If he shows an excessively right-wing bent when dealing with reform to the Constitution, he will no longer be able to garner support from the majority of the Japanese people."[25] He held out hope that dissatisfaction with the DPJ and LDP would boost third parties in the 2012 general election, writing that "the dysfunction within the DPJ, and the lack of any impetus for internal reform in the LDP, is forcing the electorate to seriously consider supporting political forces outside the traditional two-party structure".[26]

During the 2012 election race, Masuzoe expressed opposition to the consumption tax increase implemented by the DPJ, and argued in favor of deregulation and reducing corporate taxes, as well as implementation of a dōshūsei federal system.[27] He openly considered leaving the House of Councillors to run for governor of Tokyo in the 2012 gubernatorial election at the behest of DPJ legislators in the metropolitan assembly, and also considered running for the House of Representatives in the general election.[28]

Following the resounding victory of Abe and the LDP in the general election, Masuzoe announced in June 2013 that he would not stand for re-election in the July 2013 House of Councillors election, stating, "I have done the best I could for nearly three years, but I was unable to boost [the party's] strength."[29]

In March 2016, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government released Masuzoe's overseas travel expenses for 2015, which came to 57 million yen. From March 2016, the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly received a total of 610 telephone calls of complaint regarding Masuzoe's alleged extravagant spending. Then in May of that year, the Shukan Bunshun weekly news magazine reported on issues regarding public figures' official automobile travel expenses and the use of political funds for family trips. Masuzoe was the focus of the reports on the use of political funds for family trips, and came under prolonged media criticism. Masuzoe held a press conference that month to apologize for having declared over ¥370,000 spent on dining with his family at restaurants in 2013 and 2014 as "meeting-related" expenses covered by political funds. Among these were hotel expenses, family vacation trips, artwork, comic books as well as the use of government vehicle to travel to his holiday home located in Yugawara, Kanagawa Prefecture.[37][38] In the following weeks investigations into his activities uncovered further inappropriate spending of public funds. An investigation instigated by Masuzoe and conducted by lawyers determined that he had used ¥4.4 million "inappropriately", but had not committed any crime.[39] Masuzoe subsequently declared that he would refund the misappropriated expenses, but refused to resign over the issue.

Following the findings of the report and Masuzoe's admission, public discontent continued to rise in the first half of June 2016, with at least 70 per cent of Tokyo residents seeking his resignation. Masuzoe lost the support of his former backers, the LDP and Komeito parties, as they feared negative consequences in the national House of Councillors election to be held on 10 July and the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly election the following year.[39] On the afternoon of 15 June 2016, a no-confidence motion jointly submitted by all parties, including the LDP and Komeito, was to be voted upon in the Metropolitan Assembly. Despite publicly stating his refusal to step down the previous day, citing more time for public consideration, Masuzoe ultimately submitted his resignation effective 21 June to assembly president Shigeo Kawai on the morning of 15 June 2016.[40] Another reason Masuzoe gave for seeking to delay his resignation was the pending Olympic Games in Rio, Brazil, which he was scheduled to attend as the representative of Tokyo, the host of the 2020 Summer Olympics. If the election of his replacement is held in July 2016, then the subsequent election will happen in July 2020, in the middle of the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games.[39]