Japanese Lower house sets up special postal bills panel

The House of Representatives decided Friday to set up a 45-member special committee to scrutinize the government-sponsored bills to privatise Japan Post.

Most opposition lawmakers boycotted the plenary session that endorsed the launch and plan to ignore the panel, but the governing coalition decided to start deliberations anyway next Tuesday, coalition lawmakers said.

Executives of Japan’s dominant Liberal Democratic Party plan to extend the current Diet session from June 19 to early August, according to the party’s House of Councillors Secretary General Toranosuke Katayama.

The planned extension goes against Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s stance to enact the bills without extending the 150-day session. But LDP executives say they aim to gain lower house approval for the bills by June 19 and then pass them through the upper house during the extended period.

The battle among the boycotting opposition lawmakers, LDP lawmakers opposed to the policy, and the Koizumi administration over the bills is expected to intensify.

Koizumi has pressured opponents within his party to reconsider their stance, by either threatening them with the possibility of lower house dissolution or suggesting he would offer them good posts.

The bills also face strong opposition from Japan Post employees.

Koizumi, who is placing top priority on passing the bills during the ongoing Diet session, has taken the unusual steps of picking the committee’s key officials himself and replacing top bureaucrats in charge due to gaps in opinion on the policy.

Doubling as LDP president, Koizumi on Thursday named Toshihiro Nikai, head of the party’s Election Bureau, as a candidate for committee chairman, and his political ally and special adviser Taku Yamasaki as a candidate for chief director from the governing coalition.

In a related move, Yamasaki resigned Friday as special adviser to the premier to avoid giving the opposition camp another reason to boycott the deliberations in protest against a key government official taking a key Diet post on the contentious policy.

Koizumi, who had given the government post to Yamasaki after he lost his lower house seat in 2003, accepted Yamasaki’s resignation but said he wants to reinstall him after the bills clear the lower house. Yamasaki regained the Diet seat this April.

The committee on postal bills was launched more than three weeks after the government submitted them to the Diet due mainly to the opposition camp’s resistance to the policy.

The bills are designed to split Japan Post in April 2007 into four units that, under a holding company, will take over the public corporation’s mail delivery, savings, ”kampo” life insurance services and network of post offices, and fully privatise the savings and life insurance operators in 10 years.