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.”
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing