Kan & Aso and others gathered at “Corona Ginza,” a secret meeting praised by former Representative Matsumoto
On November 14, the "LDP Kanagawa Ward 1 Branch Establishment General Meeting" was held in Yokohama. Suga Yoshihide, Taro Aso, Kōichi Hagiuda, Taro Kono, and others attended the meeting and praised former Representative Jun Matsumoto, who was appointed branch leader.
At 3 p.m. on November 14, the Royal Hall Yokohama, located near Yokohama’s Chinatown, was guarded by a large number of SPs and police officers.
This was because, in addition to two former prime ministers, former Prime Minister Suga Yoshihide and LDP Vice President Taro Aso, three incumbent ministers, Finance Minister Shunichi Suzuki, Health Minister Katsunobu Kato, and Digital Media Minister Taro Kono, Policy Research Council Chairman Kōichi Hagiuda, and six other people under SP protection had gathered.
What was held here was the “General Meeting of Jun Matsumoto’s Supporters’ Association and the General Meeting for the Establishment of the LDP’s Kanagawa Ward 1 Branch.
Jun Matsumoto, 72, a former member of the House of Representatives, was forced to leave the LDP last February after it was reported that he had been going out late at night to a club in Ginza despite the declaration of a state of emergency due to the COVID-19 crisis. He is also a former cabinet minister, but was unsuccessful in last fall’s lower house election.
Matsumoto is known as one of Vice President Aso’s closest aides. He has also long been active in the Diet task force and has made his presence felt in Nagata-cho as a ‘Kokutai-zoku’ (National Diet member). Before last year’s general election, Mr. Aso repeatedly plotted to have him reinstated to the party, but he gave up the idea due to significant opposition from his hometown. As a result, he ran as an independent in the general election and was unsuccessful, losing by approximately 24,000 votes to the candidate of the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan.
After losing the election, he was reinstated by the party headquarters, but this was met with an uproar when the Kanagawa Prefectural Federation issued a letter of protest. In the end, he was finally approved by the prefectural federation this year, and in October he was finally able to assume the position of branch leader. As a result, he was able to run as an official candidate of the Liberal Democratic Party for the first district of the Kanagawa Prefectural House of Representatives in the next lower house election.
The names of “Suga Yoshihide” and “Taro Aso” were lined up as the representative sponsors for the establishment of the branch. At the general meeting, which was closed to the media, former Prime Minister Kan was the first to address the meeting.
I have known Mr. Matsumoto for more than 30 years, first as a Yokohama City Councilor and then as a member of the Diet. We have supported each other through friendly rivalry since we were both aldermen. We have been “Jun-chan, Kan-chan” friends.
Looking at our current situation, the new Corona, the situation in Ukraine, and the high cost of living, we are in an extremely critical situation. In order to overcome these challenges and hand over this country to the next generation as a solid foundation, we desperately need Jun Matsumoto, our branch manager.
He must have strong feelings for Matsumoto, since they were in the same and neighboring constituencies both as Yokohama City Council members and as members of the House of Representatives. Former Prime Minister Kan, who was criticized for “reading from a prepared script” when he was prime minister, greeted the audience on this day without preparing a script.
