ニュース 2010/02/09 Takashima announces Upper House member Tamura has joined DPJ, but coalition remains unaffected On February 9, the Secretary General of the DPJ Caucus in the House of Councillors, Yoshimitsu Takashima held his regular press conference inside the Diet, announcing that Kotaro Tamura, an independent member of the House of Councillors, had joined the DPJ. Takashima emphasized that although the addition of Tamura would mean that the DPJ caucus would now possess a majority in the House of Councillors, there would be no change in the party’s stance of continuing to organize matters under the framework of the current coalition government. Furthermore, Takashima revealed that a meeting of senior members of the DPJ caucus in the Upper House had received a report from International Department Director-General Yukihisa Fujita, who had visited the United States from February 1 to 5, and held meetings with a number of politicians from the US Democratic Party and US government officials, to the effect that “Efforts to achieve mutual understanding with the United States are extremely important, and the DPJ should create its own network in Washington for this purpose.” Takashima went on to say that yesterday he had heard from Secretary General Ichiro Ozawa that he (Ozawa) had received a request from the United States government asking a DPJ delegation to visit the US, though the dates were as yet unconfirmed, and that the DPJ caucus in the House of Councillors intended to give their full support to this proposal. Takashima said that there had been no discussion of concrete details of the visit, such as the number of Diet members who would participate, but added that he personally believed that “if the DPJ is to go about creating a network in Washington, then it would be better to create a situation where younger Diet members can participate [in the delegation] and can form the core of future diplomatic efforts.” He went on to say “Considering the fact that if the delegation is to go before the House of Councillors election, then the Golden Week holiday in May is the only opportunity, although we are not going with the intention of resolving the Futenma issue, it is likely to be an important topic on the agenda.” Furthermore, Takashima commented on reports that the party had informed local authorities of the budget allocation for various public works projects, saying, “The rule is that the answers to petitions made to the party are provided via DPJ prefectural branches as feedback. In order to comply with the rules for the provisional allocation of funds to public works projects, specific place-names are not cited, and what is provided is an estimated cost for the estimated budget requests made. We have been unofficially notifying [local authorities] of the portion of petitioned projects that is to be borne by local authorities for quite some time, before the budget was decided. Even though that information has now appeared [in the media] in the shape of a chart, this is not an infringement of our duty to protect privileged information.”