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TOKYO - He lacks dress sense, can't cook to save his life and badly flunked delivering his first policy speech. Meet Japan's new Prime Minister Naoto Kan - as seen by his wife.
These and other domestic insights are revealed in a new book by the woman Kan has called his "opposition in the home", entitled What on Earth will change in Japan after you become prime minister?
Japan's unconventional first lady, Nobuko, pulls few punches in the book about her husband of four decades, who took over in early June as prime minister of the world's No 2 economy.
"I wonder - 'Is it okay that this man is prime minister?' - because I know him well," the 64-year-old muses in the book released this week but written before Kan's party's recent upper house election drubbing.
"Many people in the current political world are lightweights. Things may turn out like this if you choose from among them."
Happy to break with the stereotype of the demure wife, sharp-tongued Nobuko relishes the role of Kan's toughest critic and famously spars with him over everything from household chores to tax reform.
She said that her image of a Japanese prime minister was closer to that of an elder statesman like Yasuhiro Nakasone, now 92, who served as a contemporary of then-US president Ronald Reagan for five years in the 1980s.
"Kan likes to be in the field ... I believe he is best suited to giving directions on the spot in support of somebody else," she said of her husband, a former civil rights activist and most recently Japan's deputy premier.
Kan is a good speaker in the street, she said, but "worse at reading prepared scripts".
"Even as a family member, I could not give him even a passing grade for his delivery of a policy speech, or for the question-and-answer sessions after he became prime minister."
She also revealed Kan has "no interest in fashion at all" and cannot cook even simple meals "because of the bad education by me and his mother".
Nobuko said most conversations between the couple, who are cousins, are about politics and admitted they are sharply divided on some issues - including capital punishment.
"We are totally divided as I strongly believe the death penalty should be abolished," she said, adding that Kan agrees capital punishment does not stop murders but still argues there is no public will for its abolition.
Elsewhere in the book, Nobuko recounts that the prime minister - a one-time pro-feminist activist and recent finance minister - "said the other day that 'markets are like a selfish woman'."
"He may have learned this from his relationships with me," she conceded. "They are difficult to handle because they will just snub you ... ."
Agence France-Presse
