Koizumi launches election campaign, seeking support for postal reform

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi called Tuesday for public support for his postal privatization plan at the start of official campaigning for the Sept. 11 general election.

"The Diet concluded that postal privatization is unnecessary. But that's absurd," Koizumi, also president of Japan's governing Liberal Democratic Party, told some 6,500 people in the city of Musashino, western Tokyo.

Koizumi began his campaigning in the Tokyo No. 18 district, where 63-year-old Masatada Tsuchiya, a former mayor of Musashino and backed by the LDP, is vying against a former president of the main opposition Democratic Party of Japan, Naoto Kan.

Koizumi focused mostly on stressing his goal of postal reform during his 15-minute speech.

"Some say postal reform is a matter of no importance, but why is it so?" he said. "A total of 380,000 people are working for the post office. There's no other reform to cut this large number of public servants."

Saying privatization will lead to an increase in revenues from corporate and property taxes, the premier said it was private companies that first started nighttime delivery services or home delivery of fresh frozen foods.

Meanwhile, Takenori Kanzaki, who leads the LDP's coalition partner, the New Komeito party, called postal privatization "the symbol of structural reform."

"If we do not proceed in the reform, Japan has no future," Kanzaki said at a street conference in Tokyo's Kita Ward.

He also said the DPJ rejected the bills to privatize Japan Post in line with the policies of labor unions, while acknowledging the necessity of reform, without presenting counterproposals.

"It's clear how the DPJ is shackled," he said, calling for the public to enable the LDP and New Komeito party to secure a majority in the 480-seat lower chamber.

Source: Xinhua