Late at night on Jan. 29, exactly nine months after the formation of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's government, a great seismic tremor struck the Japanese political landscape, as he dismissed Foreign Minister Makiko Tanaka and Vice Foreign Minister Yoshiji Nogami, and forced Muneo Suzuki, a Liberal Democrat, to resign as chairman of the Lower House Steering Committee.
The media described this action as "punishing all three who were involved" in the fiasco; namely, punishing the foreign minister and her top aide for creating chaos in the Diet in the aftermath of an attempt to shut out two Japanese nongovernmental organizations from the recent international conference in Tokyo for the reconstruction of Afghanistan, and also reprimanding Suzuki for meddling in that affair.
Thus, the prime minister handed down a verdict on the dispute between the foreign minister and her bureaucrats that had been going on incessantly since the formation of his Cabinet, with overt and covert involvement by some powerful members of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party.