Upbringing and education

Minoru Kiuchi grew up as the son of Japanese police officer and later Commissioner General of the National Police Agency Yasumitsu Kiuchi. As a result of his father's appointment as police attaché to the Japanese embassy in Bonn, West Germany, between 1971 and 1975, Minoru Kiuchi lived in Germany between ages six and ten.^[3] He attended Gotenschule elementary school in Bad Godesberg, where he took classes in German exclusively.

Upon his return to Japan, Kiuchi attended various schools in Kōbe, Tokyo, and Yokohama. In 1984, he completed his secondary education at Kaisei Academy and enrolled in the University of Tokyo's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, where he majored in international relations.^[4]

Ministry of Foreign Affairs official

In 1989, Kiuchi entered the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, by which, in 1990, he was sent to the University of Augsburg, where he studied political science and worked on further improving his German. Starting in 1992, Kiuchi was deployed as a diplomat at the Japanese embassy in Germany for three years. At this time - the fall of the Berlin Wall and Germany's subsequent reunification only just having come to pass -, the embassy was still located in Bonn, the capital of West Germany. Between 1996 and 2000 Kiuchi served as the official German-Japanese interpreter of Emperor Akihito, as well as prime ministers Ryūtarō Hashimoto and Keizō Obuchi.^[4]

Independent politician

In November 2002, exactly one year ahead of the regular general elections of November 2003, Kiuchi resigned from his post at the foreign ministry to pursue a career in national politics. In 2003, he successfully ran for office as an independent candidate in Shizuoka prefecture's electoral district no. 7, which comprises primarily about half of Hamamatsu, and which has remained his electoral district ever since. Once a member of the lower house, Kiuchi joined the LDP. After two years as a member of the LDP, he defied then prime minister Jun'ichirō Koizumi in his privatization efforts and consequently lost favor with the LDP's leadership (see 4.1). In the snap election of 2005, Kiuchi, once again, ran for office as an independent candidate but was defeated.^[5] One month later he left the LDP.^[4]

For the next four years, Kiuchi prepared himself for the 2009 election by reaching out to the community and rallying support.^[6] During this time he kept himself and his family afloat by doing various jobs such as working as a part-time teacher at a Kanagawa high school. In his autobiography, Kiuchi describes these years as having been particularly formative for him as a politician. He says that they gave him the opportunity to speak with constituents in even the most remote parts of his electoral district and that "the economic hardship [he experienced] made him pick up a habit of keeping his feet busy."^[7] In 2009, he was re-elected as an independent candidate.^[4] At the time, The Asahi Shimbun described Kiuchi's victory as overwhelming. It did so based on the fact that he had not only prevailed as an independent candidate over the candidates fielded by the two established parties, the LDP and the DPJ, but that he had also received more than twice as many votes as Takeshi Saiki, the candidate who came in second (see table).^[8]

Kiuchi is one of just a few Japanese politicians with a track record as a successful nonpartisan candidate. In the elections in which he ran as an independent, merely 11 (2003), 6 (2005), and 6 (2009) out of 480 seats went to nonpartisan candidates.^[9] Two out of these three candidacies saw Kiuchi successfully claim a seat. In the third (2005), he lost by a margin of merely 748 votes.^[10]

LDP politician

Kiuchi as State Minister for the Environment signing the Japanese-Mongolian Climate Agreement, December 2018

Kiuchi shaking hands with UN General-Secretary António Guterres at TICAD VII, August 2019

During the run-up to the 2012 elections, Kiuchi rejoined the LDP to support Shinzō Abe in his bid for the prime minister's office, remaining a supporter until Abe's resignation in 2020. In the Second Abe Cabinet formed in December 2012, Kiuchi was appointed parliamentary vice-minister for foreign affairs. When the cabinet was reshuffled in September 2014, Kiuchi was promoted to state minister for foreign affairs, a post he retained through the inauguration of the Third Abe Cabinet until October 2015. Between 2015 and 2018, Kiuchi served in the executive of various parliamentary committees and internal LDP commissions, including the Parliamentary Committee on North Korean Abductions and Other Issues, the LDP International Bureau, the LDP Economy, Trade and Industry Division, and the LDP Information Research Bureau. Under the Fourth Abe Cabinet, Kiuchi served as the state minister for the environment from October 2018 until September 2019.^[4] In this capacity, he led the ministerial climate talks in Karuizawa, Nagano, as part of the 2019 G20 summit.^[11] Since October 2019, he has served as the deputy chairperson of the LDP's Diet Affairs Committee.^[4]

After his first stint as an LDP politician between 2003 and 2005, Kiuchi has consistently refused to join any of the LDP's factions.^[12] During the 2020 race for the premiership between Yoshihide Suga, Fumio Kishida, and Shigeru Ishiba, Kiuchi supported current prime minister Suga, who is equally not a member of any of the LDP's factions.^[13]

Opposition to the privatization of Japan Post (2005)

In August 2019, retired senior politician Shizuka Kamei dedicated an issue of his serialized editorial on Japanese politics to Kiuchi's opposition to the privatization of Japan Post. In late 2005, prime minister Jun'ichirō Koizumi ran for re-election using slogans such as "from bureaucrats to the people (官から民へ)" and "where there is no reform, there is no growth (改革なくして成長なし)." Kiuchi staunchly opposed the privatization, despite being a member of Seiwa Seisaku Kenkyūkai, prime minister Koizumi's own faction within the LDP. ^[18]

Kamei recounts how then deputy secretary-general of the LDP Shinzō Abe persistently attempted to persuade Kiuchi and how Kiuchi, for days on end, received phone calls from the LDP party leadership but refused to answer them. Resisting party-pressure, Kiuchi stood by his initial stance and voted against the privatization, which led to him temporarily parting ways with the LDP. In the snap election of September 2005, he was narrowly defeated by Satsuki Katayama, one of the Koizumi Children and a so-called assassin candidate, one of many candidates hand-picked by Koizumi to defeat fellow LDP lawmakers who had opposed his privatization efforts.^[18] One month later, in October 2005, Kiuchi left the LDP (which he rejoined in 2012).^[4]

Kamei characterizes Kiuchi as someone who stands by his convictions no matter what, praising him as "one of just a few members of the Japanese Diet with backbone."^[18]

Algerian hostage crisis (2013)

Kiuchi was visiting Europe in his capacity as parliamentary vice-minister for foreign affairs when the In Amenas hostage crisis erupted. After the Japanese government heard of the attack, Kiuchi was ordered to redirect his trip to Algeria to lead the negotiations on behalf of Japan. He arrived on site on January 17, 2013, one day after the attack had begun.^[19] Among the victims were 17 Japanese hostages, out of whom 10 died when Algeria unilaterally decided to storm the site.^[20] The rescue operation was initiated against the express wishes of Japan, the United States, and the United Kingdom, who had asked Algeria to place the lives of their abducted citizens first. Japan deplored that it had not been informed ahead of time and that its requests to halt the operation were ignored.^[21] Kiuchi negotiated directly with, inter alia, prime minister Sellal and foreign minister Medelci, spear-heading the common demand by eight of the affected nations, including Britain and France, that information be released expeditiously. He remained in Algeria until January 26 to oversee the identification of the Japanese citizens killed in the attack, as well as the repatriation of their remains. Upon his return, Kiuchi reported to prime minister Shinzō Abe and met with reporters.^[22] According to Kiuchi, he left most of the questions from the press unanswered out of concern for the bereaved.^[23]