Taro Kono
Member of the House of Representatives
Taro Kono was born on January 10, 1963. He graduated from Georgetown University in 1985. After working at Fuji Xerox and Nippon Tanshi, he was first elected to the House of Representatives in 1996 for Kanagawa District 15 and has won 11 consecutive terms. He has served in a series of senior government roles: Parliamentary Secretary for Internal Affairs and Communications (2002), Senior Vice-Minister of Justice (2005), Chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee (2008), Chair of the National Public Safety Commission and Minister for Administrative Reform (2015), Minister for Foreign Affairs (2017), Minister of Defense (2019), Minister in charge of Administrative Reform and Regulatory Reform (2020), Minister in charge of COVID-19 Vaccine Rollout (2021), and Minister for Digital Transformation (2022, 2023). He currently serves as Deputy Chair of the LDP Election Strategy Committee.