Later Political Life
Hashimoto remained in the upper echelons of the LDP and led his faction for several more years. In 2001, he was one of the main candidates in the running to replace Yoshirō Mori as prime minister, but he lost the primary election to the more popular Junichiro Koizumi.
Hashimoto's faction began to collapse late in 2003 while debating over whether to re-elect Koizumi. In 2004, Hashimoto stepped down as faction leader when he was found to have accepted a ¥100 million check from the Japan Dental Association, and announced that he would not run for re-election in his lower house district.
Read more about this topic: Ryutaro Hashimoto
Famous quotes containing the words political life, political and/or life:
“I would wish that the women of our country could embrace ... [the responsibilities] of citizenship as peculiarly their own. If they could apply their higher sense of service and responsibility, their freshness of enthusiasm, their capacity for organization to this problem, it would become, as it should become, an issue of profound patriotism. The whole plane of political life would be lifted.”
—Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)
“Men conceive themselves as morally superior to those with whom they differ in opinion. A Socialist who thinks that the opinions of Mr. Gladstone on Socialism are unsound and his own sound, is within his rights; but a Socialist who thinks that his opinions are virtuous and Mr. Gladstone’s vicious, violates the first rule of morals and manners in a Democratic country; namely, that you must not treat your political opponent as a moral delinquent.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“For strange effects and extraordinary combinations we must go to life itself, which is always far more daring than any effort of the imagination.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)