Sweet dreams
Posted by ampontan on Saturday, August 27, 2011
ABIRU RUI, who covers the Kantei for the Sankei Shimbun, attended Prime Minister Kan Naoto’s news conference announcing his resignation. Here’s an excerpt from the impressions he offered on his website.
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When I was taking notes at Prime Minister Kan’s news conference and thinking “Good Grief!” as he went through the usual self-congratulatory “I did what I should have done in the difficult circumstances I was confronted with,” and “I feel a certain sense of accomplishment,” I suddenly noticed that Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Sengoku Yoshito was clearly napping.
This is the man who slept in front of the Emperor at the traditional poetry reading held at the start of the year. He probably had no intention to start with of listening to some worthless speech from Prime Minister Kan, from whom he had just parted ways.
If you were to ask Mr. Sengoku, I think he’d deny it, but all the people who saw it would say there was no question of it.
Nevertheless, at this juncture, with the deputy chief cabinet secretary asleep during the prime minister’s news conference to announce his resignation, I really wonder just what kind of administration this was. That’s always how they’ve been — a gathering of people who are distinguished from the rest only in their sense of self worth. In that sense, this was a fitting conclusion for the Kan Cabinet.
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σ1 said
Fitting in so many ways…to be sure this is a problem on both sides of the aisle and happens with stunning regularity. Do the older politicians simply think it to not be a problem? After all it’s never blown up to be a big issue…just a few disparaging articles.
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I think because so much gets decided later at night semi-informally at restaurants/drinking establishments, people expect it to be that way. The public probably has no awareness of what the reaction would be in another country. To me it reeks of a time management problem.
On the other side of the coin, I wonder about their staff size. If they don’t have enough, that would prevent delegation of work.
- A.