NationStates | Dispatch | Hideyoshi Kaburagi elected Republican Party Leader [01/12/2020]

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by The Empire of Nagakawa. 3 years 169 days ago. 9 reads.

Hideyoshi Kaburagi elected Republican Party Leader [01/12/2020]

HIDEYOSHI KABURAGI ELECTED REPUBLICAN PARTY LEADER

INADA- Hideyoshi Kaburagi has been elected President of the Republican Party, defeating Senior Defence Minister Takayuki Soejima after a tense and close race for the position.

In the election, held on the morning of 1 December 2020, Mr Kaburagi won 273 of the 500 votes cast by Republican MPs and party delegates, compared to the 227 votes won by Mr Soejima. With this victory, he will become President of the Republican Party on 2 January 2021, and will simultaneously be sworn in as the 15th Prime Minister of Nagakawa.

Mr Kaburagi, 61, has been MP for Ameya 1st District since 1996. He served briefly as Junior Foreign Minister under the Yamazaki Cabinet II in 2009, later becoming Shadow Foreign Minister in 2009, when the Republican Party lost the 2009 General Election (then Senior Foreign Minister Hanzō Aoba had lost his seat). He then served for the next ten years as Shadow Foreign Minister, proving to be popular both as a member of the Shadow Cabinet as well as an MP, winning by strong margins in the subsequent 2014 and 2019 General Elections. With his victory, Mr Kaburagi will soon announce the Kaburagi Cabinet I, which will be sworn in on 2 January 2021.

Mr Kaburagi is married to Shizuko Kaburagi (née Yoshida), and has two sons: Kyōjurō, who is 22, and Seishirō, who is 19.

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HIDEYOSHI KABURAGI- THE STEADY ASCENT OF THE 15th PRIME MINISTER
By Kōsuke Abe

Hideyoshi Kaburagi
in August 2019

A few years ago, perhaps while the Liberal Party of Takumi Ninagawa dominated Nagakawa’s politics, not many would have guessed that Hideyoshi Kaburagi, a short and bespectacled career politician and former diplomat with a quiet voice and a curious neighbourhood accent, would one day be the man elected to helm the Republican Party.

Through a series of unexpected turns and by his own grit and guts, surviving in a heavily factionalised party without any official factional affiliations, the 61-year-old Mr Kaburagi rose to the top barely a year after being relegated to the backbench, defeating neoliberal heavyweight Takayuki Soejima and becoming the successor to the maverick Prime Minister who demoted him from the cabinet.

“Kaburagi is a fearsome man”, Mr Soejima had reportedly told his cabinet staffers, according to Noboru Shimoguchi, a former Defence Ministry staffer. “Underestimate him at your own peril.”

Indeed, Mr Soejima’s words came true, as the quiet but plucky Mr Kaburagi, labelled by Liberal Prime Minister (and now Shadow Cabinet Secretary) Toshiyuki Yumizuru as a “contrarian oaf”, clinched his party’s nomination for Prime Minister, winning an overwhelming amount of support from the Uragaki Faction and chipping away at Soejima’s Koyama Faction to win a total of 273 votes to the Senior Defence Minister’s 227.

“In retrospect”, said former Republican Party Deputy Secretary-general Shūhei Nakamura, who first recommended Mr Kaburagi to be Parliamentary Secretary for the Foreign Ministry to Prime Minister Seiji Itō in 2000, “it’s not that surprising. He may not be the best speaker, but he certainly has the balls.”

Hideyoshi Kaburagi was born on 28 March 1959, the oldest of four children, in the hot spring town of Shōgō, located in Ameya Province, which later became known as Ameya Prefecture in 1979. His father Toshizō Kaburagi was the owner of a public bath, and his mother Setsuko Kaburagi (née Ozaki) was a preschool teacher. He graduated from Yōshin High School in 1978 at the age of 19, having repeated eleventh grade, and subsequently enlisted into the the Imperial Commandos, serving as a field medic in the 20th Reconnaissance Battalion for two years, before being discharged in 1981 with the rank of Corporal First Class, whereupon he travelled to Rushima Prefecture and enrolled into the University of Rushima’s Faculty of Political Studies and Economics.

Mr Kaburagi’s first brush with the political realm came in 1984, when he was detained by the secret police for publishing anti-military content. Then the head editor of the university’s student newsletter, the 25-year-old Mr Kaburagi authored a series of four articles criticising the military Prime Minister General Takehiko Ushio’s management of the Nagakawan economy, and published them in the university newsletter without permission from the university’s administrators. He was released two weeks later with a warning, but continued to write thinly-veiled critiques of the military government in the university newsletter, often disguised as poems and as comedy pieces, up until his graduation.

“No, I don’t regret it at all”, Mr Kaburagi said in an interview in 2012, when asked about his activity as a student activist and dissident. “I said many things at the time which were considered offensive and even seditious. I made a lot of people angry. To me, however, what mattered most was speaking my mind. I do not believe in self-censorship or in protecting people’s sensitivities. What I believe in is speaking your mind and standing up for what you believe is right, even if you may get into trouble for it.”

Mr Kaburagi subsequently moved to the capital city of Inada, where he worked as an analyst and an economic advisor at a diplomatic office, his prior record having somehow slipped under the radar, but following the resignation of then Prime Minister Hiroki Kita and news of a democratic election looming on the horizon, Mr Kaburagi dropped his job and joined the newly-formed Republican Party, then led by human rights lawyer Mitsunobu Ōoka, before running for office in the 1996 General Election. He took the seat for Ameya 1st District in a landslide, defeating the military council’s candidate and winning 71.7% of the vote. At the time, Kaburagi was 37.

That same year, Mr Kaburagi married Shizuko Yoshida, a medical doctor running a general practice clinic in his hometown of Shōgō. The couple had their first child, Kyōjurō Kaburagi, in 1998; three years later, in 2001, their second child Seishirō Kaburagi was born. Through Shizuko’s influence, Mr Kaburagi became an avid skydiver, and to date has clocked over a hundred jumps in various parts of the world, many with his wife and his two sons.

In 2000, Mr Kaburagi was appointed the Parliamentary Secretary for the Foreign Ministry by Prime Minister Seiji Itō, a year after winning re-election in the 1999 General Election. In this role, he served as the chief understudy and aide to the Foreign Ministry, working under five different senior and junior foreign ministers, before himself being appointed Junior Foreign Minister in November 2008 by Prime Minister Yukio Yamazaki. On 1 July 2009, as the Republican Party lost the general election to the Liberal Party, Kaburagi’s upper-study Senior Foreign Minister Hanzō Aoba lost his seat, and Kaburagi was promoted, becoming Shadow Foreign Minister and taking command of the Republican Party’s foreign policy organs.

Through the next ten years, Mr Kaburagi proved to be a formidable Shadow Foreign Minister, never missing a single parliamentary sitting and retaining his position throughout, surviving two no-confidence votes and outliving the thirteen Liberal foreign ministers, junior and senior alike, who had come and gone. He authored and co-authored a total of 49 dissents, and on one occasion in 2016, debated three Liberal cabinet ministers at once.

Unlike many other Republican leaders, who allied themselves with either the centrist Koyama Faction or the leftist Uragaki Faction, Mr Kaburagi remained unaffiliated with either, becoming something of a wild card as he supported policies from both sides.

“His most glaring weakness, in some way, is also his greatest strength”, said Shinta Matsuo, Professor of Political Science at the University of Rushima, Mr Kaburagi’s alma mater. “While he does not have the financing and the security that comes with factional affiliation, he is also largely free to speak his mind without having to worry about his faction elders. That is a great boon, especially in the eyes of the electorate, which doesn’t care about intra-party politics that much.”

In the middle of 2019, as the general election loomed and the Liberal Party’s prospects became more and more grim after several large-scale corruption scandals, Mr Kaburagi’s profile on the national level became more prominent, as the Republican Party held a leadership election. He announced his intention to run for the top job, but dropped out a month later to endorse Masakazu Hosoyama, who eventually became Treasury Secretary. The eventual winner of the leadership election, leftist maverick Yoichi Arikawa, retained Mr Kaburagi in the Shadow Cabinet, but upon the Republican Party’s return to power in September 2019, Mr Arikawa passed Mr Kaburagi over, declining to appoint him to the Arikawa Cabinet I, even as he appointed to his cabinet other rivals like Mr Hosoyama (Treasury Secretary), Isamu Hasebe (Chief Cabinet Secretary), and Takayuki Soejima (Senior Defence Minister).

Mr Kaburagi was not happy with his return to the backbench, but nevertheless remained a vocal member of the Republican Party’s senior ranks, and despite his personal grudge against Mr Arikawa, nevertheless became a great supporter of a good number of Mr Arikawa’s left-wing reforms, such as the implementation of a ¥1,200/h minimum wage in December 2019 and the regulation of the Central Bank’s monetary policies. He developed close friendships with several members of Mr Arikawa’s first and second cabinets, most notably Deputy Prime Minister and leader of the Uragaki Faction Reiko Hattori- he was present at Ms Hattori’s judo promotion ceremony in February 2020, when she received the rank of 4th dan, and Ms Hattori, in turn, was one of the pallbearers at the funeral of Mr Kaburagi’s father in April 2020. The friendships appear for the most part to be genuine- they did not, however, signify a softening on policy on Mr Kaburagi’s part.

If anything, he became bolder still.

Naturally, when Yoichi Arikawa announced his resignation, Mr Kaburagi was quick to throw his name into the ring, facing down other Republican big names like Takayuki Soejima and Senior Foreign Minister Yukio Kamii. With Deputy Prime Minister Reiko Hattori’s decision to sit out this election, Mr Kaburagi’s coast was clear to run as the foremost opposition to the increasingly outspoken Koyama Faction, which Mr Soejima leads and of which Mr Kamii is a member- now, with Mr Soejima defeated and the position of Prime Minister all but his, Mr Kaburagi faces his biggest task yet: fulfilling his promise to unify the party, to tear down or at least reduce the influence of the two great factions and their rivalries.

“It’s an almost Sisyphean task”, Prof Matsuo said. “The Koyama and Uragaki Factions have been entrenched into the Republican Party just as the Republican and Liberal Parties have been entrenched into the political scene. And even in defeat, Soejima will still be a dominating presence.

Mr Kaburagi, for one, does not appear to be daunted. At least, not the day before he was elected.

“We shall take it one step at a time”, he said.

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