He has blocked Mrs Tanaka's attempts to move her enemies in the foreign ministry to new jobs.

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Mr Tanaka's administration in Nagano has become so transparent that he even sits behind glass walls, through which voters can see their governor at work.

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Unfortunately for Mr Koizumi, evidence given to parliament from the head of the groups in question on March 4th backed Ms Tanaka's version of events and not his.

ECONOMIST: More trouble at the foreign ministry

Dr Tanaka's results suggest that the opposite is also true: to live well for a long time, it helps to have genes of a particular kind in your mitochondria.

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Ms Tanaka's deputies failed to back her up.

ECONOMIST: More trouble at the foreign ministry

Tanaka is aware of the comparisons to Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, and not just in his dress sense.

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Takeshita's predecessor as a shadow shogun, Tanaka Kakuei, also had a short tenure as premier and resigned because of various scandals.

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The year's richest newcomer is Internet entrepreneur Yoshikazu Tanaka.

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Instead, they snipe at his foreign minister, the redoubtable Makiko Tanaka, a woman whose outspokenness is unsettling those who prefer Japan's usual ultra-cautious diplomacy.

ECONOMIST: Japanese politics

Japan's top government spokesman, Chief Cabinet Secretary Osamu Fujimura, said Mr Tanaka had stepped down due to ill health.

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"It's a grave issue that troubles occur so frequently, " said Shunichi Tanaka, chairman of the Nuclear Regulation Authority, at a news conference in Tokyo on Wednesday.

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