Talk About Nuts: Japan’s First Lady Says She Was Abducted by Aliens

Miyuki Hatoyama, wife of Japan’s Prime Minister-elect, Yukio Hatoyama, is a lifestyle guru, a macrobiotics enthusiast, an author of cookery books, a divorcee, and a fearless clothes horse for garments of her own creation. She has travelled to the planet Venus. And she was once abducted by aliens.

The 62-year-old claims in a book entitled “Very Strange Things I’ve Encountered” that she was abducted by aliens while she slept one night 20 years ago.

When the new Japanese first lady related her adventures to her then husband, he told her flatteningly that it was probably just a dream. But she is confident that Yukio, the man now entrusted with the task of hauling Japan out of its deepest recession, would have reacted very differently. “My current husband has a different way of thinking. He would surely say, ‘Oh, that’s great’,” she wrote.

Mr. Hatoyama is a multi-millionaire and the fourth generation of his family to rise to the top of the Japanese political world, but his appearance is unconventional by rigid Japanese standards: his hair is unruly and he rejects the navy uniform of the political world in favour of suits of brown and moss green.

It is this refusal to bow to convention, as well as his tendency to drop conversation-stopping remarks – like his call, during the election campaign, for a “politics full of love” – that long ago led other Japanese politicians to dismiss him as an uchujin, an alien. Though not, presumably, the one who took Miyuki to Venus.

{The Independent/Matzav.com Newscenter}