Prime Minister of Japan

The Prime Minister of Japan (内閣総理大臣, Naikaku-sōri-daijin) is the head of government of Japan. The Prime Minister is appointed by the Emperor of Japan after being designated by the National Diet and must enjoy the confidence of the House of Representatives to remain in office. He or she is the head of the Cabinet and appoints and dismisses the other Ministers of State; the literal translation of the Japanese name for the office is Minister for the Comprehensive Administration of the Cabinet or Minister who Presides over the Cabinet.

The office was created in 1885, four years before the enactment of the Meiji Constitution which mentions neither cabinet nor prime minister explicitly. It took its current form with the adoption of the current constitution in 1947.

The current Prime Minister is Shinzō Abe, who took office on December 26, 2012. He is the first former Prime Minister to resume the office since 1948.

Appointment

The Prime Minister is designated by both houses of the Diet, before the conduct of any other business. For that purpose, each conducts a ballot under the run-off system. If the two houses choose different individuals, then a joint committee of both houses is appointed to agree on a common candidate. Ultimately, however, if the two houses do not agree within ten days, the decision of the House of Representatives is deemed to be that of the Diet. Therefore, the House of Representatives can theoretically ensure the appointment of any Prime Minister it wants. The candidate is then presented with their commission, and formally appointed to office by the Emperor.

Prime minister

A prime minister is the most senior minister of cabinet in the executive branch of government, often in a parliamentary or semi-presidential system. In many systems, the prime minister selects and may dismiss other members of the cabinet, and allocates posts to members within the government. In most systems, the prime minister is the presiding member and chairman of the cabinet. In a minority of systems, notably in semi-presidential systems of government, a prime minister is the official who is appointed to manage the civil service and execute the directives of the head of state.

In parliamentary systems fashioned after the Westminster system, the prime minister is the presiding and actual head of government and head of the executive branch. In such systems, the head of state or the head of state's official representative (i.e. the monarch, president, or governor-general) usually holds a largely ceremonial position, although often with reserve powers.

The prime minister is often, but not always, a member of parliament and is expected with other ministers to ensure the passage of bills through the legislature. In some monarchies the monarch may also exercise executive powers (known as the royal prerogative) that are constitutionally vested in the crown and may be exercised without the approval of parliament.

Shinzō Abe

Shinzō Abe (安倍 晋三, Abe Shinzō, IPA: [abe ɕiɴzoː]; born 21 September 1954) is the current Prime Minister of Japan, re-elected to the position in December 2012. Abe is also the President of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and chairman of the Oyagaku propulsion parliamentary group.

Abe served for a year as Prime Minister from 2006 to 2007. Hailing from a politically prominent family, at age 52 he became Japan's youngest post-war prime minister, and the first to be born after World War II, when he was elected by a special session of the National Diet in September 2006. Abe resigned on September 12, 2007, for health reasons. He was replaced by Yasuo Fukuda, beginning a string of prime ministers, none of whom retained office for more than a year before Abe staged a political comeback.

On September 26, 2012, Abe defeated former Minister of Defense Shigeru Ishiba in a run-off vote to win the LDP presidential election. Following the LDP's landslide victory in the 2012 general election, Abe became the Prime Minister again. He is the first former Prime Minister to return to the office since Shigeru Yoshida in 1948. Abe was re-elected at the 2014 general election, retaining his two-thirds majority with coalition partner New Kōmeitō Party. On the 70th anniversary of Japan's defeat in World War II, Abe's cabinet decided to succeed the former government's position on Japan's wartime past and included the statements of "apology", "colonization", "aggression", and "remorseful regret" to the sufferings affected during the war.

Prime number

A prime number (or a prime) is a natural number greater than 1 that has no positive divisors other than 1 and itself. A natural number greater than 1 that is not a prime number is called a composite number. For example, 5 is prime because 1 and 5 are its only positive integer factors, whereas 6 is composite because it has the divisors 2 and 3 in addition to 1 and 6. The fundamental theorem of arithmetic establishes the central role of primes in number theory: any integer greater than 1 can be expressed as a product of primes that is unique up to ordering. The uniqueness in this theorem requires excluding 1 as a prime because one can include arbitrarily many instances of 1 in any factorization, e.g., 3, 1 · 3, 1 · 1 · 3, etc. are all valid factorizations of 3.

The property of being prime (or not) is called primality. A simple but slow method of verifying the primality of a given number n is known as trial division. It consists of testing whether n is a multiple of any integer between 2 and . Algorithms much more efficient than trial division have been devised to test the primality of large numbers. These include the Miller–Rabin primality test, which is fast but has a small probability of error, and the AKS primality test, which always produces the correct answer in polynomial time but is too slow to be practical. Particularly fast methods are available for numbers of special forms, such as Mersenne numbers. As of January 2016, the largest known prime number has 22,338,618 decimal digits.

Minister

Minister may refer to:

See also