(Mainichi)
Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga announced his intention not to run in the upcoming Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) presidential election, effectively tendering his resignation, just last weekend, but it feels like it's been a long time since he dropped the bombshell. I think this is because he's becoming "someone of the past" fairly quickly.
The fact is, however, that the new LDP leader won't be elected until Sept. 29, and the official selection of the next prime minister is not going to happen until early October after an extraordinary Diet session is convened. This means that the "someone of the past" will remain head of the executive branch of the Japanese government for another month. In other words, the present power vacuum will continue for that long as well.
For 86-year-old former bureaucrat Teijiro Furukawa, who served as deputy chief Cabinet secretary from the Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama Cabinet (1994-1995) to the Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi Cabinet (2001-2006), a prime minister resigning brings to mind a particular memory.
On April 24, 1989, Furukawa, principal counsellor at the Cabinet Secretariat at the time, was secretly visiting then Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita at his home in the Daizawa area of Tokyo's Setagaya Ward. He was told by Takeshita's secretary to "enter from the backyard because there are press at the front of the house." Shortly after Furukawa arrived, Takeshita came home.
"Mr. Furukawa, I'm terribly sorry but I'm going to announce my resignation at the Cabinet meeting tomorrow. Could you write a draft for that?" Takeshita asked him.
At the time, the Takeshita Cabinet's approval rating had dipped below 10% following the Recruit corruption scandal involving a number of politicians, bureaucrats and business executives. During the post-Cabinet meeting press conference on April 25 to announce he would step down, Takeshita read out his statement, saying, "I would like to deeply apologize to the public for spurring distrust in politics."
Furukawa said of the late ex-prime minister, "I think he carefully considered the process of his resignation," continuing, "The authority of the prime minister has dwindled since."
True. The premier's resignation this time around was anticlimactic. Suga hasn't even held a news conference to address the people.
He said the reason for his resignation was that he wouldn't be able to balance tackling COVID-19 and the LDP leadership election campaign, because they would "require an immense amount of energy."
What? Surely his command for "one million vaccine shots a day" as well as his piecemeal declarations of states of emergency and their extensions were calculated to pave the way for the Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics, which would ultimately help him get reelected as LDP president. Using the pandemic as an excuse just because his plan failed makes him a sore loser. The "immense amount of energy" that he talked about was not the cause of his resignation, but more the result of his own doing, by inviting public mistrust.
At the time of his announcement, the Tokyo Paralympics were still going on. Suga had said he had a responsibility to make the Tokyo Games happen, even if it divided public opinion in two. However, he gave no sign of even considering putting off his white flag announcement until they were over so as not to spoil the event.
And more importantly, if he'd had insight unique to a chief executive into the power vacuum that would start the moment he stated he would not seek to continue in office, he could have asked to bring forward the party election date at the LDP executive meeting. What will happen if we are struck by a major earthquake tomorrow? It's the outgoing prime minister's job to shorten the leadership vacuum.
Two successive Japanese prime ministers have been defeated by the pandemic. And in both cases, we didn't see the kind of courtesy associated with those in such a position when they leave.
(Japanese original by Ko Koga, Expert Senior Writer)
Font Size S M L Print Timeline 0