Shinjirō Koizumi  Koizumi did a stint as a researcher at Washington-based think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies, while also active as Young Leader of the Pacific Forum CSIS. He served as his father's political secretary. He was elected to the lower house in 2009 after his father's retirement. Koizumi has served as parliamentary vice-minister for reconstruction of the northeast region of Japan that was devastated by the March 2011 tsunami and nuclear disaster. He has not, however, overtly backed his father's calls for Japan to abandon nuclear energy immediately. Koizumi grew up in Yokosuka, his father's home district, attending Kanto Gakuin University in Yokohama from elementary school through university with a Bachelor of Economics degree in 2004. When he was a student in junior high and senior high schools, he was engrossed in playing sports, especially baseball. He received his master's degree in Political Science from Columbia University. He spent one year as a part-time research fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and as Young Leader of the Pacific Forum CSIS before returning to Japan in 2007. After that, he worked as a private secretary of Junichirō, his father. Following his father's announced retirement in 2008, he was elected to his father's former seat representing the Kanagawa 11th district in the August 2009 general election, in which many other LDP seats were lost to the Democratic Party of Japan. He campaigned in a rented Toyota Prius with a volunteer staff amid criticism of his status as a hereditary politician. Koizumi became head of the LDP's young legislators caucus in October 2011, a post previously held by Prime Ministers Takeshita, Uno, Kaifu, Abe and Asō. In February 2012, he started a project called "Team 11," which sent members of the division to areas of the Tōhoku region affected by the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami on the 11th of each month to talk to locals and report back on the state of the reconstruction efforts. The group had 82 members, all under the age of 45, as of March 2013. Some observers compared the group to the powerful "Machimura faction" led by Nobutaka Machimura in terms of its political weight. He was critical of the LDP under party president Sadakazu Tanigaki. In his first meeting as a party officer, he stated that "the image of the party is that it doesn't listen to the opinions of young people, has old thoughts and a hard head.