Big In Japan
Tea, Cosy
It was a friendship for the ages, now commemorated with a house museum.
The Tokyo cottage where Ronald Reagan and Japanese Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasoe held their storied 1983 summit will now open to the public. At it’s height the Japanese were enraptured with the “Ron-Yasu” relationship, and Reagan wrote in his diaries that Nakasone was the best Japanese leader.
By 1992 the glorious friendship had faded, at least in Reagan’s eyes. Japan came up when he was being deposed by the Iran-Contra special Prosecutor:
When asked a question about a late July 1985 diary entry about
P.M. Nakasone sending emissary, very hush hush,Reagan needed to be reminded that Yasuhiro Nakasone was then prime minister of Japan.
I don’t know what that would have been about,Reagan said.
All right, sir,Walsh said.
I’m very embarrassed,responded Reagan.I’m sorry. … It’s like I wasn’t president at all.
If Americans remember Nakasone today at all it may be for his racist remarks on the intelligence of American minorities.
I Am Not A Pimp
Nakasone was in the news earlier this year, denying that he had set up a brothel for the Japanese Navy during World War II. The Japanese government has tried to euphemize the sex slaves in such facilities as “comfort women.”
The Japan Times reported:
“Nakasone’s denial is about a passage he wrote in a contribution to “Owarinaki Kaigun” (“The Navy Without End”), a collection of writings by navy war veterans.
“Some (soldiers) began assaulting (indigenous) women and others started to indulge in gambling. I took great pains to set up a comfort station for them,” he wrote.”
