JAPAN HEALTH MINISTER VIEWS WOMEN AS 'CHILD-BEARING DEVICES'

Reality intrudes slowly for some people. For others, it intrudes not at all: the current Health Minister of Japan, for example. Apparently selected from a stockpile of political dinosaurs the LDP keeps stashed away in an underground bunker somewhere, Hakuo Yanagisawa, the man in charge of national health and who presumably should be an exemplar of health- and body-related attitudes (though I admit that's asking a lot of a Japanese male who is still of the Edo period), in a Saturday speech on Japan's birth rate problem, in a slip of consciousness called women child-bearing machines. "Because the number of child-bearing machines and devices is fixed, all we can ask for is for them to do their best per head." So let's accelerate overall line production and per-head unit output, ladies. He later apologized, since women can vote in these modern times, but now that we all know how he thinks, they should put him in charge of a bakery or something, maybe he could monitor a bread-making device.