Toshiki Kaifu of the scandal-battered Liberal Democratic Party became Japan's 48th prime minister Wednesday and for the first time named two women to the Cabinet to counter an opposition-led women's revolution in politics.
Kaifu, 58, the second-youngest prime minister after World War II in Japan, named a 20-member Cabinet that wiped the slate clean of the brief and troubled administration of Sousuke Uno, who served only 68 days before resigning over a sex scandal and a stinging election defeat.Kaifu's new Cabinet announced late Wednesday included 13 members who had never served in any ministerial post before and, for the first time, a woman brought in from the private sector to guide economic planning.
Sumiko Takahara, 56, a journalist-turned-economic-commentator, was appointed minister of economic planning.
The second woman in Kaifu's Cabinet is Environment Minister Mayumi Moriyama, 61, a former deputy foreign minister, who made headlines several years ago for attempting to crash a men-only golf club in Tokyo and championing the cause of grade-school girls trying to compete in sumo wrestling.
The important post of foreign minister went to Taro Nakayama, 64, a doctor who comes from a political family that included Japan's first woman Cabinet minister.
The naming Wednesday of the fifth and sixth women to serve in a Japanese Cabinet was the first time that two women were named to a single Cabinet.
Kaifu, elected president of the Liberal Democratic Party on Tuesday, was confirmed as prime minister Wednesday in a vote by the powerful Lower House of the Diet, or parliament, in which the LDP holds an overwhelmingly majority.
But for the first time in 41 years, the largely rubber-stamp Upper House elected a competing prime minister, Socialist Party leader Takako Doi, 60, the nation's first woman leader of a major political party.
Under the constitution, however, the lower chamber determines the country's chief executive and Doi's nomination was defeated.