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Tanaka quits ending a painful chapter

By P. S. Suryanarayana

SINGAPORE Aug. 9. Japan's popular but controversial former Foreign Minister, Makiko Tanaka, today resigned from the House of Representatives, thereby signalling that she would like the people to begin trusting their political leaders after the system itself had suffered considerable damage in recent times.

The Speaker of the House of Representatives, Tamisuke Watanuki, is understood to have accepted Ms. Tanaka's resignation, while the Japanese Prime Minister, Junichiro Koizumi, is reported to have commented that the former Foreign Minister's decision should be respected.

The development brings to an end a painful chapter in Mr. Koizumi's tenure. Having come to power last year on a wave set in motion by the populist `magic of Ms. Tanaka herself, Mr. Koizumi has had to endure agonising moments concerning some of her controversial actions. No sooner had he appointed her as the Foreign Minister, the first woman to assume that office, than Ms. Tanaka resorted to an arguably people-friendly governance. However, her move produced a different kind of wave altogether, in reality a backlash from the foreign policy establishment and Japan's notoriously conservative political tribe. However, Mr. Koizumi backed her to a considerable extent until she got embroiled in a scandal arising out of the allegations that she had at one time in the past misused the state funds that had been provided for two of her aides.

These allegations were preceded by Ms. Tanaka's row with the civil service over a fellow legislator's alleged influence-peddling within the corridors of the Foreign Ministry.

In the event, she first ceased to be the Foreign Minister in January. Thereafter, it was a matter of time before she was recently suspended from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) a virtual expulsion for a person who had first entered Parliament as an independent candidate in the early 1990s before gravitating to the party which her father and former Prime Minister, Kakuei Tanaka, had helped shape.

Her recent suspension from the LDP was also followed by her ouster from the party's caucus in the House of Representatives.

In the end, it was an irony that Ms. Tanaka, who opposed the style and substance of politics that her father and his colleagues had helped mould, has had to leave the political scene, even if this turns out to be a passing phase, in much the same way as the late Kakuei Tanaka had done under a cloud of controversies concerning the Lockheed payoff scandal of the 1970s.

Last month, Ms. Tanaka appeared before the House of Representatives Deliberative Council on Political Ethics and firmly denied the allegations of any wrong-doing in regard to the deployment of state funds that were allotted as salaries to two of her aides in the past.

In bowing out of Parliament today, she shed no new light on her denials of misconduct, but claimed that she was leaving after having been reduced to the status of a lame-duck parliamentarian.

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