Yukio Edano

With James Steinberg on 27 January 2011

In January 2011, Edano became Chief Cabinet Secretary in the Kan Cabinet.[5] In March 2011, he was temporarily appointed head of the Foreign Ministry.[6]

In the wake of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in northeastern Japan, he was the face of the government efforts to combat the aftermath, frequently appearing on television to talk about the problems at the two reactor facilities in Fukushima. Because of the frequency of his appearances, Twitter users concerned with his health were prompted to post messages asking him to get some sleep. The Twitter hashtag "#edano_nero" became popular, from the imperative word for sleep! (寝ろ, nero) in Japanese.[7][8]

As economy minister in the Noda Cabinet, Edano approved the introduction of feed-in tariffs on 18 June 2012, whereby a percentage of energy use fees are used to subsidize (a shift to) renewable energy.[9]

15 July 2013

Edano left the Cabinet following the DPJ's defeat in the December 2012 general election, but retained his seat representing the Saitama 5th district.

Edano was named secretary general of the DPJ in September 2014. He retained this position in the Democratic Party following the merger of the DPJ with the Japan Innovation Party in March 2016.[10]

DP leader Renho resigned in July 2017 after the party suffered a poor result in the 2017 Tokyo assembly election. With the liberal wing of the party losing clout due to the influx of conservative Japan Innovation Party members after the merger, Edano only managed to garner 40% of the points up for grabs in the election.[11] In an attempt to unify the party, the freshly-elected leader Maehara appointed Edano as the deputy president.[12]

Edano on 18 October 2020

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe made a surprise announcement for a snap election on 25 September 2017, only three weeks after the DP leadership election. With the party unprepared and in disarray, Maehara was scrambling to find a way to shore up support for the party. At the same day as Abe's election announcement, Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike launched a new conservative party called Kibō no Tō (Party of Hope). Seeing Koike's high popularity at that time as a potential asset, Maehara coordinated with Koike on DP candidates' nominations for the election. Koike agreed to endorse DP candidates and Maehara effectively disbanded the party in order to allow the candidates run under the Kibō banner. However, despite Maehara's request, Koike imposed an ideological filter that effectively barred liberal-leaning members of the DP, such as Edano, from joining Kibō. Edano then decided to form a separate party to house liberal DP members rejected by Koike.[13]

On 2 October 2017, Edano founded the Constitutional Democratic Party as a split from the Democratic Party, becoming the party's leader.[14] Despite being formed only less than three weeks before the election, the CDP ran a very efficient campaign with a principled platform and used social media in a level unprecedented in Japanese politics.[15][16] Edano led the party to become the second largest party in the Diet in the general election.

He won the 2020 Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan leadership election, before resigning following the 2021 Japanese general election.[17] In 2023, after three years of serving without a party poisiton, it was rumored he wanted to take back leadership of the CDP following Kenta Izumi's failure to recapture momentum in the party. He released a revised version of the "Edano Vision", a manifesto he published when he served as party leader, in August 2023.[18]

On March 27, 2010, on the centennial of Japan–Korean annexation, Yukio Edano, then Japanese Minister of State for Government Revitalization, stated that "The invasion and colonization of China and Korea was historically inevitable ... since China and Korea could not modernize themselves."[20]