Change on cards in this Year of Rooster

During a New Year news conference in Ise, a city in central Japan's Mie prefecture, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said he was not thinking of dissolving the House of Representatives for an election. He referred to this year being a Year of the Rooster in the Chinese zodiac, and said that such years "have frequently served as major political turning points".

Indeed, the political ups and downs in several years of rooster, such as 1957, 1969, 1993 and 2005, have been significant for Japan.

Nobusuke Kishi, Abe's grandfather, became Japan's prime minister and spoke to the US House and Senate in separate gatherings in 1957. A co-signer of the declaration of war against the United States in 1941, Kishi was nonetheless leader of the United States' most important Pacific ally in the early years of the Cold War.