A native of Nagoya, Aichi and graduate of Hitotsubashi University, he was elected for the first time in 1993 as a member of Morihiro Hosokawa's Japan New Party after an unsuccessful run in 1990. He resigned from his office as a member of the House of Representatives, and ran for mayor of Nagoya, being elected in April 2009. On February 6, 2011 he won a landslide re-election victory, gaining three times more votes than his DPJ rival. Three-quarters of voters have also supported a referendum to dissolve the sitting Nagoya assembly, after the mayor clashed with the assembly repeatedly on issues such as devolution and the cutting down of some of the generous diets and retirement packages of assembly members, in order to reduce costs for taxpayers. The mayor announced plans in 2009 to completely reconstruct in wood the main towers of Nagoya Castle that were destroyed during the Second World War, just as in the original structure.
Controversy
On 20 February 2012, while serving as the Japanese representative of Nagoya, Mayor Takashi Kawamura made denialist statements about the Nanjing Massacre while receiving an official Chinese delegation from Nanjing. The incident led to the suspension of all official exchange between the two cities of Nagoya and Nanjing on 21 February. Some Nagoya citizens opposed Takashi Kawamura's denial by organizing lectures and setting up a website. In August 2019, Kawamura demanded the removal of an art exhibition in the Aichi Triennale art exhibition because it depicted Korean 'comfort women', Korean women who worked voluntarily in, or were forced into, Japanese military brothels in WWII. The statue was made by a South Korean artist. The exhibit itself was titled After "Freedom of Expression"? and the artists' description was as follows:
"This may seem like a little exhibition inside an exhibition. For one reason or another, due to censorship or self-censorship, most works presented here were not exhibited in the past in Japan. Although the reason for their removal varies, it shows that there is no simple dynamic in regard to "freedom of expression." "Freedom of expression" is one of the essential ideas in democracy and basic human rights. However, nowadays freedom of expression which originally means the right to criticize authorities is a subject not only limited to policy-makers. With "freedom of expression" now also regulated to some extent when it may violate the human rights of others. The exhibition provides you with information on who regulated these works, through which criteria and how, along with the background to each work, such works were censored."
Kawamura complained, saying on August 2, "Views that the matter isn't factually correct are strong. It's unrelated to a lack of freedom of expression. It doesn't have to be displayed at a venue funded with a massive amount of taxpayers' money." Additionally citing phone complaints and fears of threat of a terrorist attack, the artistic director decided to close down that section of the Aichi Triennale.
