Osaka Governor Hashimoto struggling to implement policies

Friday 15th August, 05:00 PM JST

OSAKA —

After six months in office, Osaka Gov. Toru Hashimoto, championing a ‘‘Change Osaka’’ reform program, has been trying to come up with credible measures to turn his prefecture’s deficit-ridden fiscal structure around. A former lawyer and TV celebrity, Hashimoto has drawn up a belt-tightening budget in an effort to improve the prefecture’s fiscal health, which has been in the red for 10 consecutive years. The 2.92 trillion yen fiscal 2008 budget represents a reduction of 330 billion yen, or more than 10 percent, from last year but would still mean that Osaka would remain the only one of Japan’s 47 prefectures to have maintained a deficit budget for a decade in a row.

Backed by the ruling coalition parties—the Liberal Democratic Party and the New Komeito party—Hashimoto won the Osaka gubernatorial election in January, replacing Fusae Ota. Since then, Hashimoto, 39, has been asking people in the prefecture to endure ‘‘pain.’’ His improvement program includes cutbacks in the prefectural government’s subsidies to private universities, the abolition or scaling back of prefectural facilities and cuts in prefectural government employees’ pay. Hashimoto received praise for hammering out the improvement program in a relatively short time, which some said he was able to do because he was not shackled by administrative matters. However, he has also been criticized for working it out at the expense of prefectural people’s lives. Many prefectural governors operating with deficit budgets are showing an interest in Hashimoto’s fiscal reconstruction plan. Some analysts said Osaka’s efforts to deal with fiscal issues may have a ripple effect. Before Hashimoto assumed office, the prefectural government was criticized for what was described as its dubious fiscal management, including repeated rollovers of a 500 billion yen fund for debt repayment that was maintained so that the red ink would appear smaller than it actually was.

Kyodo