Japan's top 2005 stories: Confident Koizumi leads LDP to landslide election.

(From Mainichi Daily News)

victory "Koizumi Theater," one of two grand-prize winners of an award for the best buzzwords of 2005, refers to the opera-loving prime minister's single-handed achievement of leading the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) to a landslide victory in the Lower House elections in September.

The focus of attention in the poll was definitely on Koizumi's postal privatization project after a set of bills to do so was earlier vetoed in the Upper House, prompting the prime minister to leverage it as a major election issue.

Koizumi said that -- via the elections -- he "wanted to ask voters whether they supported the privatization …