Under the influence
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Shoichi Nakagawa’s display of public drunkenness (sorry, I mean public intoxication with “cough medicine”) is one of the most extraordinary self-humiliations by an international statesman I can recall. You have to go back to the last days of Boris Yeltsin to find a similar spectacle (even the former leader of Britain’s Liberal Democrats, Charles Kennedy, didn’t make such a fool of himself). It is tempting to chuckle off the whole thing as just one of those sillinesses that foreign politicians get up to every now and then. But the more I think about it, the more serious and appalling it comes to seem, and in so many different ways, far beyond the usual run of “gaffes” perpetrated from time to time by Japanese leaders.
admin @ February 17, 2009