Candidate for my new favorite Diet member now that Koizumi has decided to stop being awesome:

Meet Etsuji Arai, LDP lower house member from Saitama’s 11th district. Doesn’t he look like a Japanese Napoleon Dynamite?

His web site address is “My Dream” – one of those English phrases that every Japanese person knows, but in Japanese rather than sounding lame, it absolutely reeks of conviction and sincerity.

As an LDP member, his basic stances should be pretty predictable, but he stands out in the following ways:

He remains one of the few LDP Diet members to have an official web site featuring an RSS feed (more on that later).

He’s a dentist.

He’s not the son of a former Diet member (but his older brother is “reformist” mayor of Fukaya City, Saitama, Iemitsu Arai.

He was elected to the Diet last year as one of the “Koizumi Children” to replace Dietman Ryuji Koizumi, who opposed the postal privatization bills.

Anyway, I just liked his picture really. He is apparently very active as a new Dietman, so let’s look forward to his continued success!

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 2nd, 2006 at 7:16 am and is filed under Japan, Net culture, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.