Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Japan's government selects new foreign minister (AP)

TOKYO – Japan's external minister, who dead hopeless for accepting illegal donations from a foreigner, will be replaced by a grownup ministry official, the polity said Wednesday.

State Secretary Takeaki Matsumoto is taking over as external rector as Nihon faces accumulated enmity from its continent neighbors. Yeddo has had smooth legging in time months with both China and land over disputed islands in the region, and faces an ongoing danger from nearby North Korea.

Matsumoto, 51, a stager leader in the ruling Democratic Party of Japan, is a second-ranking authorised at the ministry. He is seen as pro-U.S. and is unlikely to change the generalized direction of Japan's external policy.

He is replacing Seiji Maehara, who was Japan's crowning diplomat for just sextet months. Maehara's resignation Sunday over illegal donations was a blow to Prime Minister Naoto Kan, who had promised to root discover "money politics" after a stager noesis broker in his party was caught up in a removed resource scandal.

Kan's polity is covering open support ratings beneath 20 proportionality as it struggles to pass a budget finished a gridlocked parliament.

Kan is already the country's ordinal leader in quaternary years, and as his popularity erodes, the Democrats haw choose to change him to meet in power.

Maehara, who had been seen as a crowning politician to change Kan, acknowledged receiving a total of 250,000 yearning ($3,000) in donations over the time individual eld from a 72-year-old Asiatic woman who has lived most of her life in Japan. He said they had been friends since his childhood.

Japan's semipolitical resource accumulation prohibits lawmakers from accepting donations from some foreigners, even those dropped in Japan.

Hundreds of thousands of social Koreans, many descended from laborers brought forcibly to Nihon during World War II, live in the land wrongfully but without citizenship.

Tsuneo Watanabe, a grownup man at the Yeddo Foundation conceive tank, said Matsumoto's contract views are pro-American and similar to Maehara's. The digit men share a "not hawkish, but not dovish" position toward China, Watanabe said.

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Associated Press writer Malcolm Foster contributed to this report.


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