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 and/or life:
“Until politics are a branch of science we shall do well to regard political and social reforms as experiments rather than short-cuts to the millennium.”
—J.B.S. (John Burdon Sanderson)
“School divides life into two segments, which are increasingly of comparable length. As much as anything else, schooling implies custodial care for persons who are declared undesirable elsewhere by the simple fact that a school has been built to serve them.”
—Ivan Illich (b. 1926)