TOKYO — Sanae Takaichi said three things about her farm minister on Wednesday night, and they sit uneasily together. She had not asked him to go. She had not decided whether to keep him. And “responsibility for his appointment rests, of course, with me as Prime Minister.”
Kazuo Yana, minister of agriculture, forestry and fisheries, handed in his resignation at the Prime Minister’s Office that evening. Takaichi told reporters he had explained that he “could no longer allow the matter to disrupt Diet deliberations.” The matter was a set of remarks he made to supporters before he joined her cabinet, and the transcript of her press conference never spells out what he said.
That leaves the prime minister defending a choice she says she could not have checked. The remarks were made “in his local electoral district before becoming a minister,” she said, and “I had no way of knowing about them.” Afterward Yana “merely described them” as “expressions that could have caused misunderstanding,” so she instructed him to retract them and apologize.
The transcript shows a prime minister who had not settled her own view. She said she had arranged to meet Yana that evening, once the Budget Committee session ended, and, asked whether she would have kept him had he not quit, said she had “not made any decision in advance.” His explanations, she conceded, had not yet been “sufficient to gain a full understanding of the matter, including on my part.”
Arab News Japan called the exit a dismissal. Takaichi’s version differs. Asked to confirm she never urged him to resign, she answered: “Not at all. He submitted his resignation today, and I accepted it.” On Thursday she named Arata Takebe, a first-time cabinet member, to succeed him, citing, according to that report, his parliamentary experience for legislation such as a temporary consumption tax cut before the session ends on December 12.
Asked why a minister she had told to keep explaining was now gone, she answered about timing, not reasons: the letter arrived that evening, and she took it. Neither her transcript nor the reports reviewed here say what Yana said, whether anyone will now examine it, or what he told her in private.
