When Upper House lawmaker Keizo Takemi was named health minister in the reshuffled Cabinet of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida last September, the appointment was met with excitement from some corners of the medical community as well as concern from others.
That’s because the name Takemi carries a special significance for Japan’s medical establishment. His father Taro Takemi was an outspoken physician who often clashed with health ministry bureaucrats as president of the Japan Medical Association, a lobby group for private practitioners, from the 1950s to the early 1980s.
In the past 11 months, Keizo Takemi has been charting his own path, seeking to make Japan's health care policies more global and digitalized. He says his unique background — a scholar of international politics and a public health fellow at Harvard University during his brief break from politics in the late 2000s — has “helped tremendously” as he tackles reform of Japan’s health care sector today, including making better preparations for future pandemics.