How hereditary are Japanese politics? The last three prime ministers, Aso, Fukuda, and Abe, are all grandsons of former prime ministers. Reading through
this article, i see many of Aso's cabinet ministers are also related to former prime ministers.
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Originally Posted by The Economist
The make-up of his cabinet appears to dispel any doubts that he will call a snap general election. With the chief exception of Kaoru Yosano, a fiscal conservative reinstated as economy minister, the cabinet talent is astonishingly thin. Mr Aso cannot be serious.
Shigeru Ishiba is a defence expert, but he has been put in charge of farms. Hirofumi Nakasone, the new foreign minister, is notable chiefly for being the son of a former prime minister. The new internal-affairs minister is Kunio Hatoyama, another grandson of a prime minister, seen even by his friends as the most incompetent justice minister in memory. And Mr Aso has chosen Shoichi Nakagawa, a potential budget-buster like himself, as finance minister. When this correspondent recently called after lunch on the man now responsible for coping with the global financial crisis, he found him in erratic form, with his shirt unbuttoned to the waist. Japan needs more women in the workforce, but Mr Nakagawa has said that they have their “proper place” and their “own abilities” in, for example, “flower arranging, sewing, or cooking”. Countering this view has been left to Yuko Obuchi, 34-year-old daughter of another prime minister, who is in charge of reversing Japan’s declining birth rate.
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And when will Japan learn that you can't reverse declining birth rates: prosperous people just don't bread as much. Japan needs to open up to immigration to counter drastic population decline (its population is predicted to fall below 100m in the next half century from 127m today) instead of wasting money trying to get women out of the workforce.