Trips to Venus shake up women’s role in Japan
Posted: Friday, November 13, 2009 12:19 PM
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On Assignment
By Ian Williams, NBC News correspondent
TOKYO – When I asked Masako Usui what she thought of Japan's new first lady, the news presenter for the NTV television network started to bang and twist her thumbs together.
"They were returning from a trip abroad, when we saw her thumb-wrestling with her husband through the plane's window," Usui told me, as we stood on the edge of NTV's vast newsroom. "That would never have happened before," she said laughing.
For Japan's media, politics has suddenly become a whole lot more interesting because there has never been a Japanese first lady quite like Miyuki Hatoyama. If there was a premier league for first ladies, she'd be right up beside Michelle Obama and Carla Bruni, the wife of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, except that as far as I know neither of them has ever traveled to Venus.
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| Pool / Getty Images |
| Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama and his wife Miyuki Hatoyama at the premier's official residence in Tokyo on Oct. 29. |
That was the extraordinary claim Hatoyama made in a recent interview. More precisely, she said her spirit had flown there in a UFO, and that it was a beautiful place, very green.
She went on to describe how she "eats the sun" each morning to gain energy, and how she'd met Tom Cruise in a previous life. She said Cruise, who played a samurai knight in the movie The Last Samurai, was Japanese back in the other life.
That’s pretty wacky stuff, but you say that at your peril in Tokyo these days. Several people complained to me about the obsession of the foreign media with the first lady's eccentricities (Time Magazine called her "Mrs. Occult"), as if a trip to Venus was a perfectly natural thing to do.
Most Japanese are remarkably unfazed by Hatoyama's cosmic adventures, and see her as a breath of fresh air.
"She's very confident. Her attitude is: ‘This is me, accept me for who I am. This is what I do, and if you don't like it, take it or leave it.’ But in a very positive way," said Hayami Yu, an actress and singer, who has met the first lady on several occasions.
And that seems to have a broad appeal in a country where first ladies have been traditionally far less visible, and where women are still very poorly represented at the top levels of business and politics.
"In Japan, the man is the man, and the woman is the woman, walking five steps behind," said Jane Yamano, who runs a string of beauty schools and is a friend of the first lady. She says that is changing, albeit too slowly, and that Hatoyama confidence and openness is "inspiring."
A new ‘normal’
Hatoyama is used to being center stage, having once been an actress and singer with the Takarazuka Revue, an hugely popular all-female musical theater. She performed with them in the 1960s before heading to California with her first husband, who had a restaurant there. That's where she met Yukio Hatoyama, now Japan’s prime minister, who was studying engineering at Stanford.
More recently she described herself as a "life composer," or sort of a lifestyle guru, writing several macro-biotic cooking books. It was in her most recent book, "Very Strange Things I've Encountered," that she first mentioned her trip to Venus in a triangular-shaped UFO.
"The energy level is just really high," said her friend Jane Yamano. "It just makes you happy, and I think you get a special energy from her."
What also seems to have shocked Japan, but in a positive way, is the first couple’s public intimacy, something rarely seen here. They praise each other openly in public, walk hand-in-hand, and actually look like they care.
"She blow-dries his hair in the morning, chooses his necktie, and that’s how they start the day," said Yamano. "I think that’s wonderful."
She seems to have transformed her husband’s previously rather humdrum image.
Will it change broader roles?
On Thursday, via an unscientific poll in Ginza, a glitzy shopping area in Tokyo, the view of Hatoyama was overwhelmingly positive. "She's a straight shooter, and I really like that," said one young woman. "I really admire her for having her own opinions," said another.
"She’s really brought something fresh to politics," was the comment from one man. There were a couple of dissenting voices: she’s "interesting," said one woman. "Kind of strange," said another.
Hatoyama is certainly in charge, in her own way. But can she, by her example, help more women attain greater representation in Japan’s top boardrooms, which remains dismal by the standards of other rich countries?
"The mentality is changing. But it takes time to change in Japan," said Sakie Fukushima, who from her perch at the top of leading executive recruitment company, is in a unique position to judge. A few years back my colleague Tom Brokaw interviewed her about Crown Princess Masako, the Harvard Graduate and Foreign Ministry high-flyer, who married the Crown Prince, and in the view of many saw her personality, career and ultimately her health undermined by the demands of a conservative public life, that never allowed her to be herself.
To Fukushima, the first lady is a welcome relief from traditional roles. "She will certainly have a very positive impact on Japanese women’s position and acceptance."
She’s certainly brought more color to the drab world of Japanese politics. And if President Barack Obama thought he was arriving in a political world of gray men in gray suits, then the first lady seems determined to prove him wrong. Though it’s my guess that interplanetary travel will be kept well out of the conversation at tonight’s banquet.
