The new Japanese prime minister, Naoto Kan, has called his wife, Nobuko, his political “opposition in the home,” and when he took office on Friday she immediately rejected the title of first lady.
“I always thought the term ‘first lady’ isn’t suitable in Japan,” the well-known straight talker said in a phone interview with TV Asahi after Kan became the new leader of the ruling Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ).
“It refers to the wife of a US president,” she said. “I will do what I can as his wife, but I’d also like to keep my own freedom.”
PHOTO: AFP
Despite her rare public appearances compared to her outgoing predecessor, Miyuki Hatoyama, the 64-year-old housewife, a skilled speaker on the campaign trail, was once likened to Hillary Clinton, now the US secretary of state.
Nobuko has been with Kan since he was a leftist civic activist in the 1970s and gained his first parliamentary seat in 1980 after three failed attempts. Over the years she is known to have pulled strings in his political career.
In a well-known anecdote, she convinced him to reveal government culpability in a scandal over HIV-tainted blood products when he was health minister in the mid-1990s, a public revelation that earned him kudos with voters.
“If you cannot do anything about this ... you’d better quit as a parliamentarian,” she had told Kan as she later recalled in a dialogue published on the Web site of fellow DPJ member Kazunori Yamanoi.
She has also admitted that her own occasional domestic tirades may have inspired some of the parliamentary outbursts of her husband.
BLASTING AWAY
“When Kan was still in opposition, he would often blast away at ruling party politicians during parliament sessions,” she said. “Watching those scenes on television, I’d think to myself: ‘That’s what I do to him at home.’”
Their marriage went through a rough patch when a gossip magazine revealed he had spent a night in a hotel room with a television presenter.
She harshly criticized her husband, mostly for dropping his guard and imperiling his political career, but eventually let the matter go.
Kan later told the media: “My wife scolded me: ‘You idiot!’”
The couple have two adult sons and live with their cats in western Tokyo.
“My only condition for marrying him was to let me have the cats,” she said. “Kan, who was born in the Chinese Year of the Dog, likes dogs more than cats. And the cats aren’t very attached to Kan either.”
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion