BRIDGESTONE Mother - Japan PM - Wife is Nuts, sadly

Oh dear!! poor (new PM) Yukio!!

He has a crazy wife! She won't be any help to him, that doesn't bode well for Japan's first

READ BELOW... but first, read the important facts:

NEW PRIME MINISTER Yukio Hatoyama was born 11 February 1947

Hatoyama is the son of former Foreign Minister Iichiro- Hatoyama. His mother, Yasuko Hatoyama, is a daughter of Shojiro Ishibashi, the founder of Bridgestone Corporation and heir to his significant inheritance.

Yasuko Hatoyama is known as the "Godmother" within the Japanese political world for her financial contributions to both of her sons' political ambitions.

In particular, Yasuko donated billions of yen when Kunio and Yukio co-created the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) in 1996 to help establish her sons' fledgling political party.

His younger brother, Kunio Hatoyama, left his "billions-brother-mother" party DPJ and joined the big Government Party!!

Brother Kunio served as Minister of Internal Affairs and Communications under Prime Minister Taro Aso until 12 June 2009.

Hatoyama graduated from the University of Tokyo in 1969 and received a Ph.D. in managerial engineering from Stanford University in 1976

TODAY (4 sep 2009) is the Prime Minister-designate of Japan and the leader of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) and represents the 9th district of Hokkaido- in the House of Representatives. He is set to become the next Prime Minister of Japan on 16 September 2009, following a win by the opposition coalition in the 2009 elections.

Hatoyama has indicated that his wife, Miyuki Hatoyama, will take a prominent role for a Japanese First Lady during his administration

Because of his quirky hairstyle and eccentric manner, he is known by his supporters and his opposition alike as "ET" or "The Alien"

Hatoyama and his younger brother, Kunio Hatoyama, co-created the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) in 1996, using billions of yen donated by their mother, Yasuko.

Kunio Hatoyama eventually left the DPJ, saying the party had drifted too far to the left from its original centrist roots, and rejoined the Liberal Democratic Party

Yukio remained with the party through its merger with several other opposition parties in 1998.

He became the DPJ Party Chairman and leader of the opposition from 1999 to 2002, when he resigned after taking responsibility for the confusion that arose from rumors of mergers with Ichiro- Ozawa's then Liberal Party. He was Secretary-General of the DPJbefore he succeeded Ozawa as party leader following Ozawa's resignation on 11 May 2009. Hatoyama was chosen by fellow party representatives on 16 May 2009, winning 124 of the 219 votes and defeating rival Katsuya Okada.

==== CRAZY WIFE =====

Meet Yukio Hatoyama and ask her about Venus

As Japan's new prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, agonises over the formation of his government, he is unlikely to be losing much sleep dreaming up a role for his first lady. While Michelle Obama, Carla Bruni and Sarah Brown have all had to strike an awkward balance between supportive wife and public figure, Miyuki Hatoyama has cultivated a third role -- that of pedlar of new age bunkum.

With the dust barely settled on last Sunday's election, Miyuki -- whose husband will officially become Japan's leader on 16 September -- is already emerging as a gloriously eccentric foil to her humdrum hubby. While he reassures the US that his country is committed to the bilateral alliance, she regales the media with tales of interplanetary travel and, er, solar breakfasts.

"I eat the sun," Miyuki says, raising her arms as if to tear pieces off an imaginary sun. "Like this: yum, yum, yum. It gives me enormous energy. My husband has recently started doing that too." Clearly, this is where Gordon Brown has been going wrong.

When she isn't tucking into the centrepiece of our solar system, the 66-year-old former dancer pens cookbooks with humble titles such as Hatoyama Miyuki's Hawaiian Spiritual Food. She makes her own clothes (including a skirt made from hemp coffee bags) and, as she demonstrated during the election campaign, can also do a very passable Moonwalk.

But it is her extraterrestrial experiences that have triggered an avalanche of media coverage her husband could never hope to match. In a book entitled Very Strange Things I've Encountered, his wife has claimed that she was abducted by aliens as she slept one night 20 years ago, then whisked off to the final frontier. "While my body was asleep, I think my soul rode on a triangular-shaped UFO and went to Venus," she wrote, adding: "It was a very beautiful place, and it was very green."

By happy coincidence, Miyuki is married to a man whom his parliamentary colleagues once nicknamed "the Alien", a comment on his sometimes otherworldly manner and an unkind reference to his prominent eyes. His wife's revelatory book was published last year, but only now have her foibles become staples of daytime television. Perhaps revealingly, she says that when she recounted her Venusian encounter to her first husband, he suggested it had probably been a dream. But her second, the 62-year-old Hatoyama, is more accommodating: "He has a different way of thinking and would surely say, 'Oh, that's great.'"

Michelle Obama, too, will surely be delighted to learn that Miyuki sees in her a kindred spirit. "I think she is so natural and has a kind of sensibility similar to mine. If I get the chance to meet her, I'd look forward to it."

Hatoyama appears admirably unruffled by his wife's idiosyncrasies, saying: "I feel relieved when I get home. She is like an energy-refuelling base." Miyuki, too, paints an idyllic picture of life chez Hatoyama, where her husband indulges his love of animal movies and feeds his addiction to prawn crackers.

She honed her theatrical delivery back in the 60s when performing for the Takarazuka Revue, an all-female theatrical troupe that specialises in kitsch adaptations of classics such as Guys and Dolls and The Sound of Music. After six years on the stage, she moved to the US with her Japanese restaurateur husband. It was there that she met Hatoyama, then a graduate student of engineering at Stanford University. They married in 1975.

The popular notion that Japanese women are demure and subservient is a lazy stereotype, but Miyuki's behaviour would seem bizarre in any country. Judged by the standards set by previous Japanese first ladies, it borders on the impertinent. In a TV interview earlier this year,she claimed she had met Tom Cruise in a previous life, in what must have been an unnerving meeting of Scientology and new age spiritualism.

"I have a dream that I still believe will come true, which is to make a film in Hollywood," she said. "The lead actor is Tom Cruise, of course. Why? Because he was Japanese in a previous life."

Cruise, whose closest professional brush with Japanese culture was a leading role in the ludicrous 2003 film Last Samurai, "would recognise me when I see him and say: 'Long time, no see!'" Michelle Obama may not be quite so effusive.

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September 4, 2009

Japan's new First Lady Miyuki Hatoyama: 'I went to Venus in a UFO'

Japan.s new Prime Minister, Yukio Hatoyama, faces formidable foreign policy challenges in dealing with an expansionist China, a nuclear armed North Korea and a sinister Russia. But he need have no concerns about establishing friendly relations with the planet Venus -- his own wife is a friend of the Venusians, having travelled there in a UFO in the 1970s.

The distinctions of Miyuki Hatoyama, 66, do not end there. As well as being a musical actress, cookery writer, clothes maker and television personality, she also says that she knew the actor Tom Cruise in a past life when he was incarnated as a Japanese.

To his credit, Mr Hatoyama, who will formally become Prime Minister in a fortnight after a landslide election victory last Sunday, does not appear in the least embarrassed by his wife.s eccentricities, and nor do his fellow citizens. She falls into the category of public figure known as "tarento", or "talent" -- televisual artists or entertainers who are expected and encouraged to be more flamboyant and unpredictable than the rest of us.

Mrs Hatoyama began her career in a Japanese institution -- the Takarazuka Revue, a troupe of female singers and dancers who perform romantic musicals to packed audiences of middle-aged Japanese women. She was living in California, as the wife of a Japanese restaurateur, when she met the young Mr Hatoyama, who was studying engineering at Stanford University. Their marriage in the US, after her divorce, was mildly scandalous for the scion of a political family such as Mr Hatoyama. "Most men choose a partner from among single women," as he said proudly. "But I chose from among all womankind."

Since then she has established herself as a lifestyle consultant, or "life composer", and the author of several books, including Miyuki Hatoyama.s Spiritual Food and Miyuki Hatoyama.s Have a Nice Time. It was in a book of interviews with prominent people, entitled Most Bizarre Things I.ve Encountered, that she revealed her extraterrestrial jaunt, which occurred during her first marriage. "While my body was sleeping, I think my spirit flew on a triangular-shaped UFO to Venus," she said. "It was an extremely beautiful place and was very green."

Since it became likely, earlier this year, that Mr Hatoyama and his Democratic Party of Japan were likely to form the next government, she has been extensively interviewed on the daytime "wide shows" aimed at Japanese housewives. It was during one of these that she spoke of her past-life friendship with Cruise and her ambition to make a film with him.

"He was Japanese in his past life, and we were together so when I see him, I will say, .Hi. It.s been a long time., and he will immediately understand," she said. "I will win the Oscar for sure. About seven years ago my husband Yukio said to me, .Yeah, yeah, that.s a nice dream . . .. but these days, he encourages me and he sits at his computer translating the script into English even though he is tired after work."

She also described how she "eats the sun" every morning. She closed her eyes and mimed the act of removing pieces from the sky. "Yum, yum, yum," she said, placing the imaginary solar morsels in her mouth. "I get energy from it. My husband also does this."

photo of her:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/multimedia/archive/00609/000page8_185x360_609094a.jpg

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JAPAN is now officially going crazy?