Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi paid a high price for sacking Makiko Tanaka as foreign minister — a free fall in his Cabinet's popularity ratings. The debacle highlighted three major problems involving the Foreign Ministry:

(1) The irreconcilable spat between Tanaka and top bureaucrats over ministry reform caused a total breakdown in Japan's diplomatic system;

(2) The ministry's attempt to bar some Japanese nongovernmental organizations from a recent Afghanistan-reconstruction conference in Tokyo stemmed from bureaucrats' lack of awareness of the roles of NGOs in diplomacy, and;