Makiko Tanaka is amusingNovember 1st, 2005 by Joe Jones |
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I’m binging on rotten.com tonight, and came across the following brief anecdote in their profile of President Bush (scroll to bottom):
17 Jun 2001 – Japanese Foreign Minister Makiko Tanaka returns to German Town High School in Philadelphia, where she studied for two years as a high school student. During a conversation with her former classmates, Tanaka gives her concise assessment of President George W Bush: “He is totally an asshole.”
I offer a cash reward to anyone who can find audio or video of this.
November 1st, 2005 at 9:15 am
What kind of cash reward?
God that is funny—when politicians and aides pulled similar Bush-bashing stunts in Germany or Canada they got pats on the back from the PM. In Japan, you get fired! HAhahahahaha
November 1st, 2005 at 8:15 pm
I’d hit that
November 2nd, 2005 at 4:03 pm
I can’t wait to read the backpedaling….
November 4th, 2005 at 7:14 am
[...] Aso’s father, Takakichi Aso, was a big businessman: he owned a large cement company, Aso Cement. He later entered the Diet and was buddies with Kakuei Tanaka, the Nixonian prime minister of Japan who spent half of his life amassing political capital in Niigata and the other half split between running the LDP from the shadows and fending off prosecution for corruption. (Tanaka’s daughter Makiko is the short-lived foreign minister who called Bush an asshole.) Takakichi’s wife (Taro’s mother) was Shigeru Yoshida’s daughter—Yoshida being the postwar prime minister who set up Japan’s foreign and domestic policy for much of the Cold War era. Yoshida’s wife’s father was Nobuaki Makino, a Meiji-era diplomat and politician; Makino’s father was the famous samurai Okubo Toshimichi. Back to Taro Aso himself: he represented Japan in the shooting events at the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, while still president of the cement company he inherited from his father (he gave it up to run for office in 1978, and now his brother runs the company). He was appointed Minister of Public Management, Home Affairs, Posts and Telecommunications in 2003, and Koizumi apparently likes him, because he’s survived two subsequent cabinet reshuffles. [...]