Diet Career
In 1993, he was elected to the Diet for first time representing Chiba's Lower House District #4 as a member of the now-defunct Japan New Party. He later joined the DPJ and served as its Diet affairs chief as well as head of the party's public relations office. Noda acted as senior vice finance minister when the DPJ won control of the Diet in September 2009.
In June 2010, Noda was appointed as Minister of Finance by Prime Minister Naoto Kan, who was also the previous Minister of Finance. Noda is known as a reformist and has led a DPJ intraparty group critical of ex-DPJ Secretary General Ichirō Ozawa.
Upon assuming the post of finance minister, Noda, a fiscal conservative, expressed his determination to slash Japan's deficit and rein in gross public debt. In January 2011, for the first time in six years, Noda's finance ministry intervened in the foreign exchange market and spent 2.13 trillion yen to purchase dollars in order to rein in the yen’s spiraling appreciation.
Noda is said to have close relations with the United States, and has said that "China's rapid military buildup pose a serious regional risk, and stressed the importance of the US-Japan security alliance."
After Kan's resignation in August 2011, Noda stood as a candidate in the party election to replace him. He won the runoff vote against Banri Kaieda in the leadership election, meaning he would almost certainly become the next prime minister and inherit the challenge of rebuilding from the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. During the party caucus making the leadership decision, Noda made a 15-minute speech in which he summarized his political career by comparing himself to dojo loach, a kind of bottom-feeding fish. Paraphrasing a poem by Mitsuo Aida, he said, "I'll never be a goldfish in a scarlet robe, but like a loach in muddy waters. I'll work hard for the people, to move politics forward." Subsequently, he has been widely dubbed "Prime Minister Loach" in the Japanese media, and his cabinet is called the "Loach Cabinet".
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