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Smith: Fukuda, A Moderate Japanese Prime Minister

Council on Foreign Relations

Interviewee: Sheila A. Smith, Adjunct Senior Fellow
Interviewer: Bernard Gwertzman, Consulting Editor

September 24, 2007

Sheila A. Smith, a Tokyo-based CFR adjunct senior fellow, says that Yasuo Fukuda, the new Japanese prime minister, is a well-known Japanese political figure who is seen by the Japanese public as “a very adept manager of the bureaucracy.” She says that Fukuda “is a moderate, ideologically speaking,” not a conservative like his two predecessors. “He is a quite soft-spoken, self-effacing man in his public presentations,” she says. “Many people see him as very reassuring.”

Back in July, the Japanese people voted to oust the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which has ruled for years, from its majority in the upper-house of the Diet, or parliament. This led to speculation that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe might resign, though he insisted he would not. But on September 12, he did announce his intention to do so. Did this come as a shock to the Japanese?

Absolutely. All of us were glued to our television screens on September 12 because it was announced that he was going to hold a press conference and that he was intending to resign. The whole country was watching to see what he had to say. I think even people within the party were shocked.

The reason he resigned we don’t know, do we?

Abe gave a press conference this evening from the hospital and basically acknowledged that as long he was prime minister, he did not feel that he could talk about his health. He apologized with deep remorse for stopping the Diet to give it time to deal with his resignation which is now official.

Do we know what his health problems are?

His doctors went on TV after his resignation and said that his intestines had stopped functioning and he was in a fairly critical state.

Read the rest of this article on the cfr.org website.

Copyright 2007 by the Council on Foreign Relations. This material is republished on GlobalSecurity.org with specific permission from the cfr.org. Reprint and republication queries for this article should be directed to cfr.org.