Japan's next PM a softie at home, says wife

Japan's next PM a softie at home, says wife
(AFP) – Aug 31, 2009

TOKYO — Japan's next prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, likes to wash dishes, enjoys animal movies and is secretly addicted to shrimp crackers, according to his wife Miyuki, a newspaper said on Monday.

Hatoyama, who heads the Democratic Party of Japan, which won a landslide victory in parliamentary elections on Sunday, is "a natural person," Miyuki told the Mainichi newspaper.

"Hatoyama is often described as an 'alien,' but he is truly an ordinary person, a natural person," she was quoted as saying.

"He shows love without restraint, and in that sense he may appear to be an alien because he is unlike a Japanese," she added. Hatoyama has been nicknamed 'the alien' by his party in a gentle stab at his physical appearance.

The scion of a powerful political dynasty and one of Japan's richest lawmakers, the 62-year-old Stanford-trained engineer generally appears straight-faced in public, with a few exceptional smiles after Sunday's vote.

Miyuki painted a warm picture of her husband in private.

"I like to cook, but he goes to the kitchen after breakfast and dinner saying, 'I feel bad letting you do the dishes after having you cook'," Miyuki, a former actress-turned-lifestyle-guru told the paper.

Miyuki said the couple never discussed politics at home and that, instead, she gave him foot rubs after a hard day's campaigning.

"On holidays, we go to the supermarket together and he appears to have fun pushing the cart around. He likes shrimp crackers, but knowing that I will scold him, he secretly slips a couple of bags into the cart," she said.

Among his other hobbies, Hatoyama enjoys watching movies in which the protagonists are animals or have sweet plots such as Hayao Miyazaki's animation classic "Princess Mononoke," she said.

"I am a fan of action movies, and he tells me, 'Why do you like such violent movies?' But he still watches them with me," she added.

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