On Friday, former (thank Amaterasu) prime minister Hatoyama Yukio showed up in front of the Prime Minister's residence to show his support for the Friday evening anti-nuclear protests.
Hatoyama and Social Democratic Party leader Fukushima Mizuho -- the woman he fired when she would not approve his repudiation of his campaign promise to move the U.S. Marine Corps elements currently at Futenma to a location outside of Okinawa Prefecture.
Honestly, this man should be behind bars, not out on the streets.
During his premiership, his immediate underlings were discovered to be running a criminal enterprise, converting, through thousands of false transactions, taxable gift mountains of cash from his mother into bogus, non-taxable political donations, some, mysteriously and remarkably, from persons no longer living.
Ozawa Ichiro is roasted over the coals, and continues to be roasted over them, over a single loan he made to his own political organization where no taxes were evaded nor no illegal profits made.
Hatoyama gets to pay the back taxes on the gifts (600 million yen's worth of back taxes), his underlings get prison terms and he walks away scott-free.
My bad if I misunderstand the legal niceties involved, but was there not a requirement to investigate what Hatoyama knew and when it was that he did know it?
Had I been at the protest on Friday, I would have screamed "Kaere! seikyoku iranai!" * -- a sentiment seemingly shared, quietly, by some of the protest participants (J) -- or to get under Hatoyama's notoriously thin skin, insert Yosano Kaoru's deathless and dead-on epithet, delivered in Diet session two years ago (E):
"Kaere! Heisei datsuzei no o!" **
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* "Go Home! We don't need political maneuvering!"
** "Go Home! King of the Heisei Era tax evaders!"
Photo courtesy: Mainichijp
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