Wild-haired and rock-and-roll obsessed, Junichiro Koizumi was the least typical Japanese prime minister of the postwar era. He blasted Elvis records in his office, sported a shaggy mane that made him look more like a rock star than a career politician, and communicated with a theatrical directness that Japanese politics had systematically avoided for decades. Born in Yokosuka on January 8, 1942, into a political family, his father and grandfather both served in the Japanese Diet. He studied economics at Keio University and later at University College London. He entered parliament in 1972, at thirty, and spent nearly three decades as a backbencher before winning the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) leadership in 2001 on a platform of radical reform. His signature achievement was the privatization of Japan Post, which was not simply a mail service but one of the world's largest financial institutions, holding trillions of yen in savings deposits. The postal system employed hundreds of thousands of people and functioned as a massive patronage network for the LDP's rural power base. Privatizing it meant attacking his own party's infrastructure. When the upper house voted down his postal reform bill in 2005, Koizumi dissolved parliament and called a snap election, running "assassin" candidates against LDP rebels who had voted no. He won in a landslide. Beyond postal reform, he pushed deregulation of the banking sector, cut public works spending that had sustained rural construction interests for decades, and pursued a closer security alliance with the United States, including deploying Japanese Self-Defense Forces to Iraq. His visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, which honors Japan's war dead including convicted war criminals, infuriated China and South Korea and strained East Asian diplomacy throughout his tenure. He left office in 2006 with approval ratings still remarkably high for a Japanese prime minister. His reforms permanently altered the structure of Japanese public finance, though many economists argue the privatization of Japan Post created new problems as large as the ones it solved.