Do we like Junichiro Koizumi?
Our score: 7 out of 10. A reformer who later fought nuclear power and backed sick US sailors, with the contested shrine visits the one real stain.
Koizumi was born in 1942 in Yokosuka and was elected to parliament in 1972, after a stint as health minister in the late 1980s. In April 2001 he won the Liberal Democratic Party leadership and became Japan's 86th prime minister. He was re-elected to the top job in 2003 and 2005, then stepped down in September 2006.
The big story of his time in office is postal privatisation. When his own party's lawmakers helped sink the bills in the upper house in 2005, he called a snap election. His party won 296 of 480 seats, its first outright majority in 15 years, and he said “The people have said it was the right thing.”
The stain on his record is Yasukuni Shrine, which honours Japan's war dead, including some executed war criminals. In October 2005 he prayed there a month after a high court ruled such visits unconstitutional. China's ambassador called it “a serious provocation”, and South Korea summoned Japan's ambassador. Japan's government called the visit private, and some Japanese backed him. Where you land depends on whether you read it as honouring the dead or as honouring a militarist past.
On the harm test, nothing turned up on LGBTQ+ people, and that is a gap in the record rather than a clean bill. He wasn't found campaigning against any group's rights. On the planet, he went from backing nuclear power as PM to demanding zero nuclear power after Fukushima, telling a 2013 press conference restarts mean more waste.
There's nothing new on him lately, and a few junk sites have pushed hoax stories about him this year that no reliable outlet carries. His last big public fights were in 2016, when he accused Abe of lying about Fukushima being “under control” and said “It is not under control.”
The good stuff is the real thing. After meeting sick US Navy sailors in San Diego in 2016, he said the issue couldn't “be ignored any longer”, and that he bore some responsibility for deferring to experts as PM. He then set up the Koizumi Fund, which has helped about 430 US veterans with medical costs, and in 2022 his foundation gave $1.5 million to the American Red Cross.