How odd....

I'm watching the NHK "NewsWatch 9" show right now, and they had been discussing various aspects of Japanese parliamentary politics for about 20 minutes. The opposition party is having a private election to choose a new party president, etc. At one point, the anchors mentioned former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and I idly pondered the fact that although Abe's name is easy for me to remember, I couldn't quickly recall the current prime minister's name.

And then, about five minutes ago, they suddenly broke into the newscast with "Breaking news". Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda has just announced that he will resign the office of prime minister, and an emergency press conference will take place at 9:30. (That's in about five minutes.)

Well, that solves that problem...

I'm listening to the English audio (I never used SAP on TVs until I came to Japan), and if the translation was correct, when the news broke, the anchors basically repeated "Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda has announced that he will resign. There will be a press conference at 9:30", rephrased slightly, six or seven times in a row.

11:00 edit:
Well, NewsWatch 9 was extended an extra hour, as the NHK announcers and commentators tried to make sense of this surprise retirement.

Apparently, the actual news conference was announced at 6:00 this evening, with its purpose only revealed at 9:20. Fukuda was prime minister for only a year, following Shinzo Abe's surprise resignation last fall. It appears that with his personal approval ratings being very low, he felt that he wouldn't be able to effectively get his coalition's legislative program approved in the upcoming parliamentary session.

NHK was able to get news crews out to the streets of downtown Tokyo, to get the reactions of passers-by. Most were taken by surprise. One expressed hope that Koizumi would come back. I'm not sure if that's even possible.

Anyway, time for the LDP to shake itself down and pick a new leader.