Yukio Hatoyama

Trivia

• Yukio Hatoyama was Secretary-General of the DPJ before he succeeded Ozawa as party leader following Ozawa's resignation on 11 May 2009.
• The elder Hatoyama became the DPJ Party Chairman and leader of the opposition from 1999 to 2002, after which he resigned to take responsibility for the confusion that arose from rumors of mergers with Ichiro Ozawa's then Liberal Party.
• Hatoyama and his younger brother, Kunio Hatoyama, co-created the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) in 1996, using billions of yen donated by their mother, Yasuko.
• In 1993 he left the LDP to form the New Party Sakigake with Naoto Kan, Masayoshi Takemura and Shuhei Tanaka. He and Kan then left to join the newly formed Democratic Party of Japan.
• Hatoyama ran for a seat in Hokkaido's 38th district and was elected to the House of Representatives in 1986 representing the ruling LDP.
• Yukio Hatoyama then led the party to victory in the August 2009 general election, defeating the long-governing Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).
• First elected to the House of Representatives in 1986, Hatoyama became President of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), the main opposition party, in May 2009.
• Yukio Hatoyama is a Japanese politician who has been Prime Minister of Japan since September 2009.

Quotes

• “People have raised expectations for leader Ichiro Ozawa.”
• “Common sense tells us it's been set for Mr. Ichiro Ozawa to stay on.”
• “Now is a time of crisis for our party. It is necessary to ask someone who has a lot of experience to take over and do the job.”
• “Far more than 70 percent of the people in this country ... want the Mori government to step down just as quickly as possible.”
• “Now the echo of your anger toward the coalition system which centers on Mori and the Liberal Democratic Party is spreading across the whole country.”
• “The government bowed to U.S. pressure and put President Bush's wishes ahead of the safety of Japanese consumers. I consider that a huge error of judgment.”
• “Our party has convinced the people that we have the potential to govern, and that we are able to become the alternative party in a bipartisan system.”
• “This was a huge miss on the part of the government.”
• “This is a unilateral vote without sufficient debate and discussions, and we can never approve of this.”
• “Mr. Koizumi looked at George Bush and the Japanese people's food safety and he chose the US president. It is outrageous.”