Biography
Kunio Hatoyama was born in Tokyo in 1948. He is son of Yasuko Hatoyama and Iichirō Hatoyama, a bureaucrat who later became a third-generation politician, and grandson of Ichirō Hatoyama, who became the President of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and Prime Minister of Japan between 1954 and 1956. His brother Yukio Hatoyama, also a politician and leader of the rival Democratic Party of Japan, became the country's Prime Minister in September 2009 following a landslide victory in the August 2009 election. His maternal grandfather is Shōjirō Ishibashi, founder of Bridgestone.
Hatoyama attended the Faculty of Law at University of Tokyo and graduated with a degree in political science. He wanted to get into politics right away and became an aide to Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka. He ran for the House of Representatives in 1976 as a member of the New Liberal Club and entered the LDP after winning.
In 1993 he left the LDP and became a conservative independent, saying he wanted to form a new party to oppose the LDP. He was briefly Minister of Education, Science, Sports and Culture in the Cabinet of Prime Minister Tsutomu Hata.
In 1994 he helped form the now-defunct New Frontier Party, which he left in 1996 to form the Democratic Party of Japan with his brother, Yukio Hatoyama, and became the Vice Leader of the opposition. Divisions between the brothers eventually led him to leave the DPJ in 1999, and he re-joined the LDP in 2000 after running unsuccessfully for the seat of the Governor of Tokyo.
He joined the Abe cabinet as Justice Minister in August 2007, and maintained his post through the September inauguration of the cabinet of Yasuo Fukuda. Serial killer Tsutomu Miyazaki was executed during his tenure. After the execution, he was called "Grim Reaper" by the Asahi Shimbun, which made him angry.
Subsequently, in the Cabinet of Prime Minister Tarō Asō, appointed on 24 September 2008, Hatoyama was moved to the post of Minister of Internal Affairs and Communications. In a dispute with Asō over a possible replacement of Japan Post Holdings president Yoshifumi Nishikawa Hatoyama resigned on June 12, 2009.
He is a member of the Japan-Korea Parliamentarians' Union.
He is married to Emily Hatoyama (née Emily Baird, aka Emily Takami), the daughter of an Australian army sergeant, Jimmy Baird, and a Japanese woman. Emily is a former model and actress.
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