BIOGRAPHIC DATA ON JAPAN'S DIET FRESHMEN

C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 02 TOKYO 001139 SIPDIS NOFORN SIPDIS PLEASE PASS TO INR/B E.O. 12958: DECL: 02/17/2016 TAGS: PINR PREL PGOV ECON JA SUBJECT: BIOGRAPHIC DATA ON JAPAN'S DIET FRESHMEN Classified By: Ambassador J.T. Schieffer. Reasons 1.4 (b/d). ¶1. (SBU) SUMMARY. Since the September 2005 election of 83 freshmen Diet members, Post has had several opportunities to gather biographic data on some of them. What follows is a summation of that data. END SUMMARY. ¶2. (C//NF) Yoshitami Kameoka of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) revealed during a lunch with Emboff that he has a great love of baseball and shared that he had been catcher on his high school team as well as a player and coach while at university. He played twice in the prestigious summer national high school tournament at Koshien Stadium while a teammate of former Giants pitcher Suguru Egawa. He is proud of the camaraderie among the LDP first termers and sees them as a force for the future, not unlike the US Republicans of ¶1994. In conversations with fellow freshmen Diet members he was very casual and used informal Japanese He told Emboff that maintaining the US-Japan alliance was his top priority as a legislator, taking precedence over other domestic issues. (Note: Since this meeting Kameoka has arranged with Emboff an Embassy vs. Diet baseball game to be held at Tokyo Dome. As a sign of his loyalty to his fellow freshman class, he has limited the Diet team roster to only the new "Koizumi Children".) ¶3. (C//NF) LDP Diet member Chubei Kagita speaks no English and apparently has no US experience. He told Emboff during a lunch that he was the former mayor of Nara City and that he took pride in his Kansai roots. (Comment: The Kansai dialect may in fact be his first language.) Before becoming mayor Kagita held a local office and appears to be something of a career politician. The way in which he described his recent political ascent indicates that he is probably a true LDP loyalist and he is taking his new status as a Diet member in stride. Kagita flagged pensions and Japan's demographic shift as two major issues facing Japan at the moment. He is keen to exchange ideas on pension systems and expressed interest in how the American system of pensions and social security worked. He was intrigued with Emboff's explanation of the concept behind the US 401(k) plan, with which he was unfamiliar. ¶4. (C//NF) Jun Hayashi, also an LDP Diet member from Kamakura, speaks little English. He told Emboff that his constituents have a negative view of US military base issues but that he himself is very positive about the US-Japan alliance. He is very interested in traveling to the US to take part in an exchange with US members of Congress. He also indicated interest in health care. ¶5. (C//NF) Hiroshi Ogushi of the Democratic Party of Japan speaks English well but is more comfortable in Japanese. He professes to know many people at US Treasury from his time working in the office of the International Monetary Fund's (IMF,s) Japanese Executive Director in Washington. He compared notes with Emboff about the bad traffic in Los Angeles and Washington, DC. ¶6. (C//NF) LDP Diet member Masahito Moriyama of Osaka/Kobe speaks English very well, apparently because he worked at the OECD in Paris for a few years. He also has spent time in the US on business while working for the GOJ, including meetings with the Department of Transportation and other agencies. He told Emboff that he has four children: three girls and a boy, all of whom are grown. He indicated interest in economic and social reform issues such as Japan's birthrate which he discussed at length. He asked why the US was not participating in the Kyoto Protocol, which may indicate an interest in environmental issues. He is thoughtful, has a youthful appearance and was a snappy dresser. He left a very good impression on Emboff. ¶7. (C//NF) Hideki Makihara, a lawyer by training and member of the LDP, expressed interest in international trade issues and noted his previous career at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) in a meeting with Emboff. He is interested in US concerns over the GOJ's shift toward East Asia and South Asia as demonstrated by the government,s promotion of free trade agreements (FTAs) with Korea and ASEAN. ¶8. (C//NF) LDP Diet member Toshiko Abe, who received a PhD. in nursing science from the State of Illinois University, adopted a somewhat confrontational approach while strongly voicing her disapproval of US policies in meetings with Emboff. She noted that the LDP manifesto had a clearly TOKYO 00001139 002 OF 002 stated policy of maintaining Japan's food self-sufficiency and even advocated increasing it from 40 percent to 45 percent, a very important part of maintaining a country's strength and food security. She also criticized the success of Toyota in the US, adding that US jobs had been created at the expense of Japanese ones. ¶9. (C//NF)) Hirotaka Ishihara, son of controversial Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara and a member of the LDP, told Emboff that Japan could learn from US examples of promoting foreign direct investment (FDI). He highlighted his background in the financial sector and commented on his interest in the US fiscal condition because Japan held 80 trillion yen ($684 billion) worth of US bonds while at the same time the GOJ was facing 774 trillion yen ($6.6 trillion) budget deficit. Ishihara also was curious about how Americans learned military theory. Because the US was such a major military power, he wanted to know how Americans learned about military affairs. He wondered whether there existed a kind of American "military arts" similar to Japanese "budou". ¶10. (C//NF) Takao Ochi of the LDP commented that the East Asia Economic Caucus (EAEC) advocated by Mahathir in 1989 had tried to exclude Europe and the US but the current East Asia Summit (EAS) did not. The idea of an Asian Monetary Fund (AMF) had been unacceptable in 1997 but the current framework of ASEAN 13 was designed to cope with crisis. He believed the US should participate in the EAS because it had a stake in the region. At the same time he noted the importance of Japan promoting the US-Japan alliance. ¶11. (C//NF) LDP Diet member Keisuke Suzuki revealed that he had worked at the Ministry of Finance (MOF) during Asia's financial crisis and that the idea of an AMF had often been broached. He was interested in the EAS and wondered about the US reaction to Russia being brought into the framework, a request from China. He also asked whether the US might change its policy toward joining the framework. SCHIEFFER