Nakagawa found dead in Tokyo home

Shoichi Nakagawa, a former finance minister who stepped down after appearing intoxicated at a news conference in Rome earlier this year, was found dead at his Tokyo home on Sunday.

According to Metropolitan Police Department officials, Nakagawa, 56, was found lying face down on a bed on the second floor of his home in Tokyo's Setagaya Ward by his wife, 50, a little after 8 a.m. Sunday.

There was no suggestion of foul play or that he had taken his own life. Neither a preliminary postmortem examination nor an autopsy later the same day determined the cause of death.

Nakagawa's drunken appearance at the conference in February served as a major embarrassment for the administration led by Taro Aso.

According to the investigators, Nakagawa was found wearing a polo shirt and short pants. He had vomited on the bed. Ambulance staff confirmed Nakagawa's death and examiners determined at 10:41 a.m. that he had likely been dead for 12 hours or so.

Police found a package of pills on a table in the bedroom but did not disclose their contents.

Nakagawa's daughter told police she saw her father lying in bed around midday Saturday. His wife told police that when she returned home around 9 p.m., Nakagawa appeared to be sleeping.

No one was seen entering or leaving the bedroom after that until the next morning when Nakagawa's wife went to wake him up and found he was not breathing.

Police said they have not found a will as yet.

In recent months, Nakagawa had complained of insomnia and been treated at a hospital, which prescribed him sleeping pills.

Nakagawa was born in 1953. A graduate of the University of Tokyo's faculty of law, he worked for the former Industrial Bank of Japan before winning a Lower House seat in 1983 which was left vacant by the death of his father, Ichiro Nakagawa. The senior Nakagawa was found dead after apparently hanging himself in a Sapporo hotel.

Shoichi Nakagawa served eight consecutive terms and assumed such key posts as farm minister and economy and trade minister before doubling as finance minister and state minister in charge of financial services in the Aso administration.

However, his slurred speech during a news conference following a meeting of Group of Seven finance ministers and central bank chiefs left government officials in Tokyo red-faced.

Nakagawa, who had a reputation for being a heavy drinker, resigned in the wake of harsh criticism about his behavior, which he blamed on cold medicine he had taken.

He lost both in the single seat and the proportional representation races in the Aug. 30 Lower House election that brought the Democratic Party of Japan to power.

Lower House member Muneo Suzuki, the 61-year-old head of the New Party Daichi who competed bitterly against Nakagawa to succeed the political base left by Nakagawa's father in the December 1983 Lower House election, said he wished he "could have had the chance to talk more."

"It's a tragedy running over two generations. His life was too short," said Suzuki, a former aide to the senior Nakagawa, adding, "Was it fate? I don't know what to say."

Former Prime Minister Taro Aso said Nakagawa "was a key figure in reconstructing the Liberal Democratic Party and leading it in the future."

"I am shocked to the point where I have no words," Aso said of his close friend's death.

Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama called Nakagawa's death "extremely unfortunate."(IHT/Asahi: October 5,2009)