Japanese politics: Hashimoto’s new party wants to make Osaka secondary capital

Japanese politics: Hashimoto's new party wants to make Osaka secondary capital

TOKYO — Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto’s new national political party will seek to decentralize power in Japan to create a “multipolar” state, he said at a news conference Thursday.

     Its goals include making his city, the country’s third-largest, into a “subcapital,” he told reporters.

     The party will hold its inaugural convention later this month. It springs from the same local political movement that spawned the opposition Japan Innovation Party, with which Hashimoto has parted ways. More than 15 Diet legislators, mostly representing the Osaka area, have expressed interest in joining.

     The “Osaka” in the name of his new outfit will represent its goals of devolving more powers to local governments and correcting the runaway political, economic and demographic concentration in Tokyo, he said, calling it a “reform party.”

     Replacing the city of Osaka with semi-autonomous wards like Tokyo’s will form a central plank in the party platform. The ward idea would remove overlapping levels of government, proponents claim. After voters rejected that idea in a May referendum, Hashimoto declared he would retire from politics upon the end of his mayoral term in December. At Thursday’s presser, he suggested he may lead the new party temporarily while right-hand man Ichiro Matsui seeks re-election as governor of Osaka Prefecture, to which the city belongs.

     Hashimoto denounced the Japan Innovation Party, which he helped create, as having become a “sham.” He predicted its members would jump onboard the main opposition Democratic Party of Japan “to save their necks as Diet members.”

     “What their doing now isn’t rallying the forces of reform,” he said.    

(Nikkei)

Japanese politics: Hashimoto's new party wants to make Osaka secondary capital