Anti-market 'samurai' at helm of Japan banking
He slams US-style globalisation as "the law of the jungle", wants a return to the samurai spirit and laments a Japan "wrecked by free markets" -- meet Shizuka Kamei, Japan's new banking minister.
The 72-year-old leader of the People's New Party -- one of the ruling Democratic Party's junior coalition partners -- has been put in charge of supervising Japan's vast financial services industry as well as postal affairs.
"I will give all I have to rebuild a Japan that has been wrecked by market fundamentalism and free-market economics," Kamei told reporters late Wednesday after joining new Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama's cabinet.
One of his first declarations was that he would seek to help small companies by allowing them a moratorium of several years on the repayment of loans -- remarks that sent banking shares lower on the stock market.
Kamei was a vociferous opponent of the outgoing Liberal Democratic Party's privatisation of the massive postal system -- the signature reform of former premier Junichiro Koizumi -- and is expected to move to reverse it.
"The fact that Japan's leading opponent of postal privatisation is now the head of postal affairs suggests the privatisation process will almost inevitably be reassessed," Barclays Capital economist Kyohei Morita said.
Kamei said Wednesday he did not aim to return to the past but to "try to rebuild the postal services in order to revitalise the local economies and help develop Japan's society and economy in a robust manner."
Japan broke up its sprawling post office in October 2007, creating a new commercial bank with the world's largest savings, starting a long privatisation process that was set to reshape the country's finance industry.
Under the privatisation plan, the banking and life insurance units were to be floated on the stock market sometime between 2010 and 2017, but that plan is now up in the air.
Kamei was expelled from the long-ruling LDP in 2005 by Koizumi, who picked Internet entrepreneur Takafumi Horie to run against him.
Kamei -- a former top bureaucrat in the National Police Agency -- set up his own party and beat Horie, who just a few months later was indicted for securities fraud. He was later sentenced to two and a half years in prison.
Kamei, who witnessed the US nuclear bombing of Hiroshima in 1945, was once tasked with tracking the Japanese Red Army extremists who carried out a series of hijackings and violence on embassies abroad in the 1970s and 1980s.
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