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Marutei Tsurunen

Marutei Tsurunen (born 30 April 1940), born Martti Turunen, was a Finnish-Japanese politician who served as a Democratic Party member of the House of Councillors from 8 February 2002 to 28 July 2013. He was the first European to serve as a legislator in Japan.

Biography[]

Martti Turunen was born in Lieksa, Finland in 1940, and he and his family were among the few survivors of a Soviet partisan attack on their village during the Continuation War amid World War II. He served as a Lutheran missionary to Japan in 1967, and he decided to become Japanese and became a citizen in 1979, changing his name to the Japanese "Marutei Tsurunen". He settled in Yugawaramachi, Kanagawa Prefecture in 1981, and he was elected to the Yugawaramachi City Council in 1992. As an independent politician during the 1990s, he pledged to make Japan into "a citizen-friendly nation" without concerns about old age and pollution and sexual quotas to ensure that between 40% and 60% of legislative assembly seats were made up of women; he also campaigned to become "the first Japanese citizen with blue eyes" to be elected to the upper house. He served in the House of Councillors from 2002 to 2013 as a member of the Democratic Party of Japan, and he served as director of his party's Japan-South Korea Relations Department from 2003 until his retirement in 2016.

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