Here’s to you, Mr. Aso

To begin on a serious note, I was among those who cheered the news that Japan’s entrenched, right-wing “Liberal” Democratic Party was finally giving somebody else a chance to run the country. Yet we may pause to shed a tear for the man whose incompetence helped bringed about this change, Taro Aso; for he was, after all, one of us. I hereby present a salute to the man we hate to love, Japan’s late and (debatably) great Otaku Prime Minister (that’s him in the lower right-hand corner).

In the late 80’s, otaku public image suffered a blow because of serial killer Tsutomu Miyazaki, who happened to have a couple of hentai tapes in his closet (but what serial killer doesn’t?). Just when it seemed like even Japan would turn its back on anime and manga enthusiasts, then-Foreign Minister Taro Aso stepped up–to a stage in Akihabara–and announced that he, himself, was an Akiba Otaku.

I’ve tried like anything to find this speech on YouTube, without success.

When I was in Japan in 2008, visiting Akiba nearly every day (except, quite luckily, one day when I happened to be elsewhere), Taro Aso was our hero. It wasn’t until I had just left that I learned, incredulous, that he had just been elected Prime Minister. It then turned out that Mr. Aso was ultra right wing, making statements excusing compulsory re-education in colonial Taiwan, stating he wanted to make Japan a pace “rich Jews would visit,” and even, perhaps most sinister of all, that Japan “would conquer the world with otaku culture.” I am not making this up.

Now, we’ve all had embarrassing leaders. For all I know, Mr. Aso may be quite an intelligent man, in spite of misreading kanji in his addresses to Diet and having once accidentally told them they “stank.” But according to my host father’s theory, he was the straw that broke the camel’s back: the LPD had been in power for so long that they figured the public would swallow anything. It turns out they were wrong. But for one brief, shining moment, otaku had a friend in high places. Even if he probably thinks the Nanjing Massacre never happened. But hey, he likes Rozen Maiden.