Hisayasu Nagata

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Hisayasu Nagata (永田 寿康 Nagata Hisayasu, born September 2, 1969 -) is a Japanese politician born in Nagoya City in Aichi Prefecture. He graduated from Keio High school in 1988, Tokyo University in 1993, and then entered the Finance Ministry. He took a leave of absence to study for an MBA at UCLA in 1995. He resigned his position in 1999 to run for the Lower House in Chiba Prefecture. He resigned on March 31, 2006 in reaction to the fallout from using a fake e-mail to suggest that LDP politicians had accepted funds and bribes from former Livedoor CEO Takafumi Horie.

[edit] Heisei Court Jester

Nagata's career in the Diet was marked by numerous embarrassing and controversial episodes.

On November 20, 2000, Diet member Kenshiro Matsunami doused Nagata with water for suggesting that he had slept with female Diet member Chikage Ogi. Nagata later claimed he had said nothing of the sort and was actually only stating that then Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori was unfit to be the leader of his country.

On April 5, 2001, he asked questions at the main session of the Diet without written notes, suggesting a new level of preparedness in younger politicians who do not need to follow scripts in making speeches or during hearings, unlike their older superiors.

In November 2002, a convict was killed at Nagoya Prison after being blasted with a high-pressure water hose. Nagata and others tried to prove that this was not an accident and that the officers who committed the act were, indeed, negligent by conducting a similar experiment on a mannequin. However, it was later revealed that the water pressure of the hose used in the experiment was more than ten times that of what had been used at the time of the incident, and, hence, the DPJ was later forced to apologize.

On March 11, 2004, he made disparaging remarks about Prime Ministers Ichiro Ozawa, Yoshiro Mori, and Junichiro Koizumi. The ruling Liberal Democratic Party protested his words and they were removed from the record.

In July 2005, he accused the LDP coalition party the New Komeito Party of illegally moving voter registrations to Tokyo in the recent metropolitan elections. Nagata had no proof and based his statements on rumor, and the DPJ apologized to the Komeito.

In a similar incident in August, Nagata accused the Komeito supporter group, the Soka Gakkai, of not registering as a religious group. The group has been registered as such since 1952, and the group brought suit against Nagata for libel later that month.

On February 16, 2006, it was revealed that an email he was using to accuse the LDP of accepting illegal funds from the discredited Livedoor corporation was fake. When it was revealed that the email was faked by a freelance reporter and handed to Nagata, and that he had trusted the source without question, the scandal became the sole topic of news for several weeks. Nagata finally revealed his source and had his party membership suspended on February 28 for 6 months. He finally resigned on March 31.