Renho's decision to appoint former prime minister Noda Yoshihiko as her party's secretary general, second only in power to her, perhaps indicates her desire to pay it safe.
"Teachers enjoy having cleaner kids and having cleaner books to mark," she said, but added that the problem has not been helped by similar taboos in the west: the UN secretary-general first used the words "open defecation" in a speech in 2012.
When the former United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan, first proposed a global AIDS fund in 2001, he envisioned a pot of $7 billion to $10 billion, increasing each year.
In the last year, since Secretary General Annan first raised this issue in the General Assembly, it has been the fodder of academic and policymaking debate.
But by the time Boutros-Ghali became UN secretary general, the first stirrings of a new mood towards a wider Middle East peace settlement were apparent, and the Arab members of the UN accepted his election without protest.
He explained the process: the Secretary General must first condemn events as constituting crimes against humanity, then there can be a vote on Article 70, which must be introduced by someone in the Security Council.
Asserting the independence from political factions that was the hallmark of his electoral campaign, Mr. Koizumi seemed to follow through in naming a longtime ally, Taku Yamasaki, to the post of secretary general, the second most powerful person in the party that has governed Japan for almost all of the last four decades.
Secretary General Kofi Annan, the first to emerge from the hall, appeared taken aback, however.
It was a previous secretary general, Kofi Annan, who first pledged to eliminate the scourge of sexual abuse from the UN.
Diplomacy to end the impasse moved to the headquarters of the Organization of American States in Washington today, as a new group calling itself the Friends of the Secretary General held its first meeting.
