Yuriko Koike (born 15 July 1952) was Governor of Tokyo from 1 August 2016, succeeding Yoichi Masuzoe. A former LDP politician, she founded the conservative Tomin First no Kai party in Tokyo as an alternative to the increasingly corrupt LDP, and she later launched Kibo no To as a national party.
Biography[]
Yuriko Koike was born in Ashiya, Hyogo Prefecture, Japan on 15 July 1952, and she came from a wealthy family. She became a news anchor in 1979 after working as a journalist, and she was elected to the House of Councillors in 1992 as a member of the Japan New Party. She was re-elected in 1996 as a member of the New Frontier Party, later serving as a member of the Liberal Party of Japan from 1997 to 2000, the New Conservative Party from 2000 to 2003, and the LDP from 2003 to 2017. Koike served as Junichiro Koizumi's Environment Minister from 2003 to 2006 and as Shinzo Abe's Defense Minister in 2007, and she sought the LDP's presidency in 2008, comparing herself to Hillary Clinton and Margaret Thatcher. However, she placed third, losing to Taro Aso. She was elected Governor of Tokyo in 2016, becoming the first woman to hold the title, and she campaigned on a platform of "seven zeros" to eliminate seven rising problems in the capital, including the number of children on daycare center wait-lists, as well as reducing the number of abandoned pets that were euthanized to zero. She supported economic liberalism, administrative and budgetary reform, women's advancement in the working world, a carbon tax, replacing plastic bags with furoshiki cloth bags, nationalistic textbook reform, a neoconservative foreign policy, and reduced congestion during the city's rush hour. Koike was controversial for being a conservative-nationalist populist who may have embellished her academic records, who made big campaign promises without fulfilling them, and who relocated the Toyosu Fish Market. However, she was popular for her media presence (she promoted Japanese popular culture and cosplaying) and for her quick response to COVID-19. She left the LDP in 2017 to found Tomin First no Kai, and she transformed it into a national party as Kibō no Tō ("the Party of Hope") with the goal of transforming it into the main opposition to the LDP, an effort which was unsuccessful. However, she was re-elected as Governor in 2020, having promised the creation of a Japanese version of the United States' Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), support for struggling residents and businesses, strengthened suicide prevention measures, the successful hosting of the Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics, an increase in public childcare facilities to support working parents, increased support for working women, increase of paternity leave acquisition, and support for the shift of the beginning of the academic year to September.