-Japan's prime minister-elect Yukio Hatoyama (R) and his wife Miyuki Hatoyama, who claims she was abducted by aliens 20 years ago.-
With Taro Aso, the Japanese prime minister, conceding defeat in parliamentary after exit polls suggested a landslide victory for Yukio Hatoyama and his Democratic Party in parliamentary elections, a dramatic transformation of Japanese politics has been achieved.
More than half a century of almost continuous rule by the Liberal Democratic Party has been brought to an end.
Hatoyama campaigned on promises of more people-centred politics, and has pledged to smash Japan's rigid pro-business bureaucracy.
New Direction in US - Japan alliance ?
The newly elected DPJ, which vowed more independence from Washington, may relocate US bases in Japan and end its support for US efforts in Afghanistan.
DPJ may want to challenge the US’s large footprint in Japan. Another potential sticking point involves the 47,000 US troops stationed in Japan, as Agence France-Presse reports:
Hatoyama in the past supported calls to remove Futenma air base — long a source of friction as it lies in a crowded urban area — out of Okinawa. A plan between the two countries would shift the Marine base’s facilities to reclaimed land on a quiet part of the island.
Kevin Maher, who heads the Japan desk at the State Department, said that a realignment deal reached with a previous government on Okinawa — under which 8,000 Marines would head to the US territory of Guam by 2014 — was final.
“It’s an agreement between nations; it’s not an agreement between parties,” Maher said at the American Enterprise Institute, another Washington think-tank.
The DPJ may also pull back its support for US efforts in Afghanistan, AFP reports:
'I was abducted by aliens', says wife of Japan's new PM.
Miyuki Hatoyama, wife of Japan's prime minister-elect, Yukio Hatoyama, is a lifestyle guru, a macrobiotics enthusiast, an author of cookery books, a retired actress, a divorcee, and a fearless clothes horse for garments of her own creation, including a skirt made from Hawaiian coffee sacks.In her claim in a book entitled Very Strange Things I've Encountered that she was abducted by aliens while she slept one night 20 years ago, that has suddenly drawn attention following last Sunday's poll.
"While my body was asleep, I think my soul rode on a triangular-shaped UFO and went to Venus,It was a very beautiful place, and it was very green."" she explains in the tome she
published last year.
Mrs Hatoyama's self-confidence in projecting her personality, and shattering the traditional expectations of a political wife, probably derives from her early years as a dancer in Japan's legendary all-female Takarazuka theatrical troupe. Founded in 1913, Takarazuka has long enjoyed cult status in Japan. The star players in its glitzy, saccharine, ferociously camp productions of American classics like Gone with the Wind enjoy superstar status among the armies of middle-aged women that flock to the shows.
Takarazuka's actresses are picked from thousands of teenage hopefuls in a stringent selection process and subjected to a quasi-monastic training regimen.
While a handful become household names, the great majority, like Mrs Hatoyama, retire after a few years. But the aura of belonging to this exclusive sorority clings to them for ever.
After six years Mrs Hatoyama quit the troupe and went to the United States. It was there, while working in a Japanese restaurant in San Francisco, that she met Yukio, then a graduate student at Stanford University. Miyuki was still married to her first husband.
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