Junichiro Koizumi took on party conservatives as a politician. As the voice of Ultraman King he'll be confronting space monsters. Photograph: Toshiyuki Aizawa/Reuters
As a politician he took on party conservatives and became one of Japan's most popular postwar prime ministers. In retirement Junichiro Koizumi, the silver-haired reformer with an Elvis Presley obsession, is about to confront a very different foe: space monsters.
Koizumi, who retired from politics before August's general election, has swapped the soapbox for the studio to lend his voice to Ultraman King, an ...
Japan passed a law on Friday to stop the privatization of the nation's huge postal service, a symbolic move to roll back the small-government policies of former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi earlier this decade. The law halts the planned sale of shares of the postal service, which is also one of the world's largest banks, with $3.4 trillion in assets. The Democratic Party, whose election victory last summer ended a half-century of Liberal Democratic rule, campaigned on canceling the privatization plan, which was widely seen here as depriving Japan's rural areas of banking ...
