Ichiro Ozawa (born 24 May 1972) was Minister of Home Affairs of Japan from 28 December 1985 to 22 July 1986, succeeding Toru Furuya and preceding Nobuyuki Hanashi. Ozawa was Secretary-General of the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan from 1989 to 1991, but he left the LDP in 1993, later co-founding and leading the Japan Renewal Party, New Frontier Party, the Liberal Party of Japan, the Democratic Party of Japan, the People's Life First party, and a new incarnation of the Liberal Party.
Biography[]
Ichiro Ozawa was born in Tokyo, Japan on 24 May 1972, and he graduated from Keio University and Nihon University. In 1969, he was elected to the House of Representatives as a Jiminto member (and a member of Noboru Takeshita's faction), and he would serve as the LDP's Secretary-General from 1989 to 1991. He was initially a member of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), serving as its secretary general from 1989 to 1991. He left the LDP in 1993 and subsequently served as head of a number of other political parties, first by co-founding the Japan Renewal Party with Tsutomu Hata, which formed a short-lived coalition government with several other parties opposed to the LDP. Ozawa later served as president of the opposition New Frontier Party from 1995 to 1997, president of the Liberal Party from 1998 to 2003 (which was part of a coalition government with the LDP of Keizo Obuchi from 1999 to 2000), President of the opposition Democratic Party of Japan from 2006 to 2009 and Secretary-General of the DPJ in government from 2009 to 2010. In July 2012, he left the DPJ with 50 followers to found the People's Life First party in a protest against the DPJ's plan to raise the Japanese consumption tax. Ozawa's party merged with the newly founded Tomorrow Party of Japan of Shiga governor Yukiko Kada prior to the 2012 general election, in which the party performed poorly. Ozawa and his followers then left to form the Life Party (the rebranded Liberal Party), which merged into the Democratic Party for the People in 2019; he and most of his fellow DPFP members then joined the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan in 2020.