Yoshihiko Noda

Adviser, Centrist Reform Alliance; Prime Minister 2011-2012 Japan

Center-left

Grown-up politics as a moral creed: somebody has to pay for the pension bill and somebody has to take the blame - and he volunteers for both, right up to the landslide.

• Fiscal responsibility before campaign promises
• The consumption-tax hike that split his party
• Centrist realignment, not regime change
• Take responsibility and resign
• Opposition leader against Takaichi
• Article 9 revised to name the SDF
• Selective separate surnames
• Senkaku nationalization
• Hop, step - then the fall
• A responsibility worth ten thousand deaths