questions to bureaucrats during special fiscal screening committees of the established under Yukio Hatoyama. In June 2010, then Prime Minister Naoto Kan appointed her as Minister for Administrative Reforms. Upon taking the post, Renhō stated that she would be giving particular attention to eliminating waste in the 21 government account. She lost her seat in Cabinet in a subsequent reshuffle, but was retained as a special advisor to the Prime Minister. In the 2010 House of Councillors election, she garnered a record 1,710,734 constituency votes. She served as a member of the Cabinet of Japan from 2010 to 2012, serving as Minister for Government Revitalisation and Minister of State for Consumer Affairs and Food Safety. In September 2011, she was re-appointed as State Minister of Government Revitalization (responsible for administrative reforms) in the cabinet of then prime minister Yoshihiko Noda. Her new portfolio also included responsibility for civil service reform, gender equality and Japan's declining birthrate. She served in this post until a cabinet reshuffle in January 2012. The DPJ was ousted from government in the 2012 general election, following which Renhō returned to the opposition bench. She retained her seat in the 2016 House of Councillors Election. Head of the Democratic Party (2016–17) In September 2016, she was elected as the leader of Japan's Democratic Party, making her the first woman elected as their leader, and the first person with mixed ethnic heritage and born with foreign citizenship to head a major political party in Japan. As head of the Democratic Party, she stated her opposition to revisions of Article 9 of the Constitution, but that she was willing to join debates with the Liberal Democratic Party on other constitutional revisions. She viewed Abenomics to be a partial success, but pushes for greater investment in education, child-rearing and nursing care. She also ruled out forming a coalition government with the Japanese Communist Party and opposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership. During the presidential election, Renhō claimed that she had given up her Taiwanese citizenship. However, reports emerged that her Taiwanese citizenship had not been properly renounced. In response to doubts regarding her legal status, she took steps to renounce her Taiwanese citizenship beginning in late 2016. In July 2017, the Democratic Party suffered a very poor showing in the Tokyo prefectural election. Some senior party members blamed the results, in part, on the ongoing questions surrounding Renhō's citizenship. In response to