警察との事前打ち合わせ（英語字幕）と英語ニュース

Prime Minister Taro Aso is rich - should anyone care?

http://www.japanprobe.com/?p=6873

Fifty people gathered at Hachiko yesterday to hold a protest march directed at Prime Minister Taro Aso’s very expensive home in Shibuya-ku. The protesters, who organized the event on the internet, had not applied for a permit, so police blocked them when they attempted to start their march. Three people were arrested - one organizer and two protesters who had assaulted police officers.

The protest has come at a time when the Japanese press is giving a lot of attention to the wealth of politicians. A few days ago, it was the Asahi attacking the Prime Minister Taro Aso’s habit of dining at expensive hotel bars and restaurants (paying the bill with his own money, not official government funds). Now Mainichi is printing articles about the wealth of Aso and his cabinet:

Members of the Cabinet, including Prime Minister Taro Aso, own an average of 141.28 million yen in family assets, the government has announced.

The figure is 24.33 million yen more than the average of the Cabinet of his predecessor Yasuo Fukuda.

The average amount of personal wealth that the prime minister and his 17 Cabinet members have in their own names came to 118.29 million yen.

Of the 18, Aso is the second wealthiest with 455.48 million yen in assets he owns in his own name and the names of his family members he lives with, following Internal Affairs and Communications Minister Kunio Hatoyama, who is worth 764.6 million yen.

Mainichi states that Aso might be the second wealthiest Prime Minister in Japanese history. That sounds like he is ultra rich, but his 455 million yen ($4.8 million) fortune isn’t quite as big as the wealth of other first world leaders such as George W. Bush ($15 million), Helen Clark ($8 million), Kevin Rudd ($37 million), and Silvio Berlusconi ($9.4 billion).