Tell it like it is, Makiko!

For some reason, the latest posts seem to have turned out to be about Japanese politics, a topic that I usually avoid like the plague, but since the insanity seem to have infected the political sphere recently as well I cannot avoid to bring up the subject.

I mentioned her very briefly in the previous post, but after talking to some Japanese friends and reading up a bit on her I think I need to share with you all some of the greatness that Makiko Tanaka has achieved in her political life. I’m not going to write a bio or anything like that, for those details you can just read up on wikipedia. It seems like she has support for being “outspoken” and “frank” and not as stuck up as most politicians. However, her frankness has oftentimes bordered on the bizarre and definitely amusing side.

During the Koizumi administration she was appointed foreign minister and during that time she managed to call George W. Bush an “asshole” in a public setting, something that, regardless of what you think of him, is probably not something that you want your foreign minister to say out loud since it might make diplomatic relations with the primary trading partner of your country a little… awkward… Then she managed to get herself fired, not because of that incident, but because of calling the bureaucracy at the foreign ministry a “swarm of demons”. Granted, I’m sure that they were difficult to deal with, but she sure didn’t make any friends.

After that incident she got barred from the ruling LDP party and got thrown out in the cold but now, in a move that to me seemed very opportunistic, she latched on to Hatoyama and joined the DPJ (I’m sure there were negotiations there for her to get a nice minister position in exchange for bringing in her fans from the LDP voting herd). So now she’s made a glorious comeback into Japanese national politics, joining the previous adversary, and we’re bound to see a lot more of her, something that actually might be quite entertaining.

Let me share with you a very funny true anecdote from 2001 when she was supposed to support a local LDP candidate in Gunma prefecture at a public rally. A Japanese friend told me this entertaining story and you can also read about it on the Japanese wikipedia page. Basically, she arrived one hour earlier at the location and could not be bothered to wait for the candidate she came to support and started her speech where she launched into a tirade about how she didn’t want to be in Gunma (can't really blame her, Gunma is a pretty sad place) doing this speech because she had other much more important business elsewhere and how she didn’t know anything about this candidate she was supposed to endorse, not knowing even whether it was a man or a woman until a few minutes before the meeting when she was given a pamphlet from a staff member.

The candidate, being informed that HER campaign meeting had been started without her rushed to the scene and managed to catch the speech from Tanaka and trying to disarm the somewhat awkward situation and bask a little in the glory of her high-up party member tried to put her arms around Tanaka’s shoulders to which she received a screaming “Don’t touch me! I don’t know you and I don’t like it when people I don’t know touch me!” Then Tanaka promtly took off to better and more important tasks, after successfully finishing her meeting endorsing the candidate. Oh? The candidate, she lost the local election even after getting support from such a high up, tough luck.

On Wikipedia there is also a quite amusing collection of quotes from her, but I will just treat you to my favorite here:
“That person looks like he’s had a lot of curry and then had diarrohea and that’s why his face got so thin” (said about a political opponent)

Oh yeah, then she also proclaimed that the reason for former prime minister Abe not having any children was because he was “shooting blanks”, it is unlikely that she had access to reliable information about his actual sperm count though...

Well, at least Japanese politics doesn’t look like they’ll get boring this year…