Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Governor of Tokyo Shintaro Ishihara to Quit, Form a New Party and Re-Enter National Politics


Just when he has made a complete mess with the relationship with China over the Senkaku Islands, and when a questionable accounting of Tokyo's failed Olympic bid for 2016 starts to surface, he calls it quits.

From Asahi Shinbun tweet (10/25/2012):

石原都知事は都庁で緊急記者会見を開き、辞職を表明しました。「今日をもって都知事を辞職する。国会に復帰しようと思っている。新党を立ち上げて仲間とやっていく」と話しました。会見は今も続いています。

Governor of Tokyo Ishihara held an emergency press conference and announced that he would resign as the governor. "I resign as the governor as of today. I intend to return to the National Diet. I will form a new party with the like-minded people", he said. The press conference is still ongoing.


Ishihara is probably quite popular with people whose source of information is the traditional media (TV, newspapers, magazines).

The boy-wonder mayor of Osaka City, who is badly trailing in the polls but continues to be a media darling (good or bad), was in talks with 80-year-old Ishihara at one time about possible cooperation.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ishihara and Hashimoto will most likely join forces to create their right wing nutjob party and be revisionists to further whitewash japans horriffic war crimes .... like minded people he says... he means racists and fascist fucks hell bent on destroying japan for their own egos ...

Anonymous said...

I struggled to express the level of disgust that Ishihara invokes within me, but in the end, I failed in achieving an adequate means of doing so.

Anonymous said...

As far as I know Ishihara pioneered a new way to increase public works construction costs: while traditionally you just built something useless (say, Aqua Line bridge) now you build TWO useless things: rather than just building olimpic facilities, rebuild the fish market somewhere else AND build olimpic facilities where the old fish market was.
Twice the concrete! Twice the money!
You would think it would make more sense to fix/modernize the old olimpic facilities and leave the fish market where it is but no.

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