Former Japanese finance minister Shoichi Nakagawa found dead

[jose v]

Oct. 5, 2009
A former Japanese Finance Minister was found dead in bed yesterday beside packets of sleeping pills months after he caused an uproar for appearing drunk at an international press conference.


Shoichi Nakagawa


An initial examination found that Shoichi Nakagawa, 56, was suffering from circulatory disease and had traces of alcohol in his body. After the humiliation that he suffered after the drunken debacle at a G7 meeting in Rome in February, however, there will be speculation that he committed suicide.

Video of his performance at the press conference, during which he slurred, misunderstood questions and appeared to nod off, was broadcast across the world. Despite claiming to be suffering from the intoxicating effects of cough medicine, Mr Nakagawa resigned a few days later.

During the Japanese general election campaign in August he apologised repeatedly for the incident and promised to give up alcohol. He lost his seat in the northern island of Hokkaido in a nationwide landslide victory for the opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ).

Mr Nakagawa, who had a 25-year-old son and 17-year-old daughter, was found by his wife. There were traces of vomit on the bed and packets of what appeared to be sleeping pills on the bedside table, according to the Kyodo news agency. Neighbours said that he had looked unhappy in recent weeks and had neglected his garden.

Taro Aso, the former Prime Minister who was close to Mr Nakagawa, said: “I’m in such a state of shock right now that I do not have words. I offer my deepest condolences.”

Mr Nakagawa was, in many ways, a typical senior member of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) which ruled Japan almost undefeated until this year. He graduated from the law faculty of the University of Tokyo and became a banker.

His constituency, a sparsely populated region of farmers and fishermen, was known as the Nakagawa Kingdom; for 20 years before he was elected in 1983, Mr Nakagawa’s father, Ichiro, was its MP. His son succeeded to it when his father hanged himself in a hotel at the age of 57, after failing to be elected the LDP leader.

Mr Nakagawa became Agriculture Minister in 1998 and had three other Cabinet posts before becoming Finance Minister.

His social conservatism was suggested in an interview that he gave in 2007. He said: “Women have their proper place: they should be womanly. They have their own abilities and these should be fully exercised, for example in flower arranging, sewing or cooking.” His drinking was an open secret among journalists and civil servants, but ordinary Japanese were shocked to see his performance in Rome and the excuses that he made afterwards. It emerged that after he left his news conference, he went to the Vatican Museum, where he climbed over a barrier around a statue, setting off a security alarm.

“I feel terribly sorry for the Japanese public as well as the Diet that such footage and words of mine were conveyed to the world,” he said to a parliamentary panel. Mr Aso asked him to resign.

www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article6860536.ece