HOPING FOR CHOCOLATE

I've posted herein on Japan's Vanilla Syndrome before; I suspect that the radical results of yesterday's election will be a political example thereof. After 50 years of political vanilla, with no real suggestion of change regarding all-out public works on concretized rivers, dams up the wazoo and bridges to nowhere; no complaint about politicians being scions of wartime zaibatsu; no sense of impropriety at the revolving door of descendants of prime ministers becoming prime ministers, the Japanese public has by a wide majority selected chocolate, an apparently new political flavor where there was none before.

But is it really a different? Is it truly chocolate? Or is it just dyed vanilla? Mightn't it be like the standard Japanese chocolate cake, i.e., pretty much flavorless cakiness colored brown and declared deliciously chocolate? Japanese ice cream as well has made a skeptic of me; I suspect this will be another political example of the Vanilla Syndrome, to wit:

Taro Aso, the vanilla prime minister, is the grandson of former Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida, who co-founded the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). Aso's wife's father was the late Prime Minister Zenko Suzuki; his sister married into the royal family.

Yukio Hatoyama, the chocolate prime minister and head of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), is the grandson of Ichiro Hatoyama, who was prime minister from 1954-1956 and a co-founder of the LDP. Yukio's father Iichiro served as foreign minister; his younger brother Kunio has served in several ministerial posts in the Aso government.

I wouldn't bet on this being chocolate. It may be called chocolate, it may even look like chocolate; but to an old genuine choice-lover like me it looks a lot like it could be the same old vanilla with just a little coloring.

Let's have a taste and see... any hint of chocolate in there?

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Things are already changing: Japan's new first lady has traveled on a UFO to Venus!

Funny that didn't come up during the campaign... You have to wonder, though,
about the effect this will have on the nation's extraplanetary policy...

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She also eats the sun,
and knew Tom Cruise when he was Japanese...


Chocolate is beginning to look like the Rock of Ages...