TOKYO -- Two female Cabinet ministers resigned Monday for separate election campaign scandals, dealing an ill-timed political blow to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and two of his stated policy goals: empowering women and returning Japan to nuclear power.
The two were the highest-profile women in Abe's government and among the five women he appointed to his Cabinet last month, matching an all-time high for the number of women in minister-level positions.
One of the two was Yuko Obuchi, the popular daughter of a former prime minister who was supposed to lead the government's efforts to persuade a skeptical public to allow the restart of Japan's shuttered nuclear plants.
The turmoil in his Cabinet deals a setback to Abe at a vulnerable moment, just as his "Abenomics" policies for reviving growth are showing signs of losing steam.
Earlier this month, the International Monetary Fund slashed its growth forecast for Japan, saying that the blow to consumer spending from an increase in the national sales tax this spring was larger than expected.
The resignations are also the first political crisis faced by Abe, who has enjoyed relatively high approval ratings since taking power in December 2012. Two ministers resigning on the same day because of scandal is unheard-of even in Japan's often short-lived Cabinets, prompting local media to draw ominous comparisons with Abe's first term seven years ago, when he was forced to resign after a series of political scandals.
Calls for Obuchi to step down as trade minister had been increasing after revelations that her support groups may have used political funds to treat supporters to trips to a popular theater and to buy them handkerchiefs and neckties from a boutique run by Obuchi's brother-in-law.
Opposition lawmakers said such uses of funds could be a violation of laws against bribing voters, a charge Obuchi denied at a news conference Monday to announce her resignation.
Obuchi, a moderate who was being groomed to possibly become Japan's first female prime minister, had been given one of the toughest jobs in the Abe government: winning public support for restarting at least some of Japan's 48 nuclear reactors, idled after the 2011 Fukushima accident.
"I sincerely apologize, as a member of the Abe Cabinet, for failing to make any contribution to reviving the economy or bringing about a society in which women shine," Obuchi said, repeating one of Abe's political slogans.
The other woman to step down was Midori Matsushima, who resigned as justice minister after criticisms that she handed out free hand-held fans to supporters, a possible violation of political finance laws that prohibit gifts of monetary value to voters.
Despite the apparently small value of the fans, opposition lawmakers had begun calling for a criminal investigation into Matsushima, saying it was particularly unseemly for a justice minister to violate the laws she was sworn to uphold.
Hoping to limit the political damage, Abe accepted the resignations and quickly appointed two successors, both relatively unknown lawmakers from his governing Liberal Democratic Party. Only one of the two replacements was a woman, reducing the number of women in Abe's Cabinet to four.
The other three women in his Cabinet have also been hit by their own, smaller problems. Eriko Yamatani, chairman of the National Public Safety Commission, which oversees the nation's police forces, has come under criticism for appearing in a photograph with a member of the Zaitokukai, an ultranationalist group accused of hate speech against ethnic Koreans in Japan.
The internal affairs minister, Sanae Takaichi, and the minister in charge of gender equality, Haruko Arimura, have also been criticized for their extreme right-wing views.
On Saturday, the two joined Yamatani to become the three highest-ranking members of Abe's Cabinet to visit the Yasukuni Shrine during an autumn festival. The visit to the shrine, which honors Japan's war dead including executed war criminals, drew strong displeasure from China at a time when Abe is trying to arrange a summit with the Chinese president, Xi Jinping.
A Section on 10/21/2014