beyondBeijing2008.com

 TOKYO – When I asked Masako Usui what she thought of Japan’s new first lady, the news presenter for the NTV television network started to bang and twist her thumbs together.

“They were returning from a trip abroad, when we saw her thumb-wrestling with her husband through the plane’s window,” Usui told me, as we stood on the edge of NTV’s vast newsroom. “That would never have happened before,” she said laughing.

For Japan’s media, politics has suddenly become a whole lot more interesting because there has never been a Japanese first lady quite like Miyuki Hatoyama. If there was a premier league for first ladies, she’d be right up beside Michelle Obama and Carla Bruni, the wife of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, except that as far as I know neither of them has ever traveled to Venus.

Pool / Getty Images

Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama and his wife Miyuki Hatoyama at the premier’s official residence in Tokyo on Oct. 29.

That was the extraordinary claim Hatoyama made in a recent interview. More precisely, she said her spirit had flown there in a UFO, and that it was a beautiful place, very green.

She went on to describe how she “eats the sun” each morning to gain energy, and how she’d met Tom Cruise in a previous life. She said Cruise, who played a samurai knight in the movie The Last Samurai, was Japanese back in the other life.

That’s pretty wacky stuff, but you say that at your peril in Tokyo these days. Several people complained to me about the obsession of the foreign media with the first lady’s eccentricities (Time Magazine called her “Mrs. Occult”), as if a trip to Venus was a perfectly natural thing to do.

Most Japanese are remarkably unfazed by Hatoyama’s cosmic adventures, and see her as a breath of fresh air.

“She’s very confident. Her attitude is: ‘This is me, accept me for who I am. This is what I do, and if you don’t like it, take it or leave it.’ But in a very positive way,” said Hayami Yu, an actress and singer, who has met the first lady on several occasions.

And that seems to have a broad appeal in a country where first ladies have been traditionally far less visible, and where women are still very poorly represented at the top levels of business and politics.

“In Japan, the man is the man, and the woman is the woman, walking five steps behind,” said Jane Yamano, who runs a string of beauty schools and is a friend of the first lady. She says that is changing, albeit too slowly, and that Hatoyama confidence and openness is “inspiring.”