There is no political party in Japan that is less necessary than the Constitutional Democratic Party…The limits of being a “leader of the opposition” as a representative of the Japanese Renewal Party observed for many years as a member of the Diet .The image of “a party that only follows the path of the government and does not come up with counter-proposals.”

The building has been occupied by the Democratic Party of Japan since 2020. 2-5-3 Hirakawacho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo (Photo = Pintsumo/CC-BY-SA-4.0/Wikimedia Commons)

Why Yuichiro Tamaki aspired to be a politician

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Yuichiro Tamaki, representative of the People’s Democratic Party, was born on May 1, 1969 in Samukawa-cho, Okawa-gun, Kagawa Prefecture (now Sanuki City) to a father who worked for an agricultural cooperative and a mother who work at a special nursing home.

Tamaki helped plant rice, plant wheat, and spray fertilizers and pesticides. Farming taught me the importance of cooperation and co-existence.

The oldest of three children, Tamaki attended Kagawa Prefectural Takamatsu High School and graduated from the Faculty of Law at the University of Tokyo. After graduating in April 1993, he joined the Ministry of Finance and was assigned to the General Affairs Division of the Public Accounts Bureau. In 1995, he studied abroad at Harvard University’s Kennedy School in the United States. He received an MBA from the same school in 1997. In 1998, the Ministry of Finance’s hospitality corruption scandal occurred. Seeing this event and the experience of studying abroad inspired him to become a politician.

After being seconded to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Middle East Division 1), he became Director of the General Affairs Division of the Osaka Regional Tax Bureau in 2001. Seconded to the Cabinet Office in 2002. In the Koizumi’s first Cabinet, he was appointed as a special secretary under Nobuaki Ishihara, the Minister in charge of Administrative Reform. Since then, he has been the secretary and expert for three generations of the same pastor.

Kazuyoshi Kaneko, the second minister, invited him to become a politician, and he had a meeting with Shinzo Abe, who was then secretary-general of the Liberal Democratic Party. However, the Liberal Democratic Party already had another Diet member in Tamaki’s hometown of Kagawa 2nd Ward, so Abe suggested running from a district with one more seat. Tamaki decided not to run because he thought, “If I’m going to challenge national politics, I want to do it where my ancestors’ graves are.”

Why the Democratic Party and not the Liberal Democratic Party?

In August 2005, the House of Representatives was dissolved, and Tamaki resigned from the Ministry of Finance after serving as chief auditor of the Bureau of Accounts. He ran as a candidate for the 44th House of Representatives election from Kagawa 2nd Ward on September 11 with the support of the Democratic Party.

The reason he ran for the Democratic Party of Japan rather than the ruling Liberal Democratic Party was because he believed that “a change of government should be achieved through a struggle between political parties, not a fight within the Liberal Democratic Party.” ‘ In this election, the Liberal Democratic Party won a landslide victory due to the Koizumi earthquake. Tamaki put up a good fight, garnering 70,177 votes in just over a month of campaigning, but lost to former Liberal Democratic Party member Yoshio Kimura, who won 100,794 votes and was defeated without even a proportional return. After that, he lived the life of a ronin for almost four years.

After losing the election, while working on public relations activities in his hometown, he visited Yoshiko Morita, the eldest daughter of Masayoshi Ohira, who was from the same area and had once been Prime Minister. Tamaki was a distant relative of Ohira, and she wanted the cooperation of the Ohira family.

Tamaki was a candidate for the Democratic Party of Japan, which opposed the Liberal Democratic Party led by Ohira, and Morita was reluctant to contact Tamaki at first. However, in the end he agreed to meet Tamaki, and introduced Morita’s eldest daughter (Ohira’s granddaughter), Mitsuko Watanabe, to Tamaki. Watanabe then served as Tamaki’s official secretary from 2009.

Watanabe recognized Tamaki as “the owner of Ohira’s spirit,” and appealed to Liberal Democratic Party supporters in his constituency to support Tamaki. After that, he ran again in the 45th House of Representatives election, which was held on August 30, 2009, from the Kagawa 2nd Ward with the support of the Democratic Party.