Ever on the lookout for sneaky connections, the media had characterized the July 9 reunion of Hitomi Soga and her family in Indonesia as being rushed through by the Liberal Democratic Party in time to help its election chances July 11. Some people even thought North Korea was in on it.
While the family was stuck in a traffic jam en route to their luxury hotel in Jakarta, TBS, which was covering the reunion live, had to fill up time, and the pundits in the Tokyo studio argued over whether or not Pyongyang had allowed Soga's husband, Charles Robert Jenkins, and their two daughters to leave the "Hermit Kingdom" in order to help the LDP; the idea being that Kim Jong Il doesn't want to change Japanese prime ministers in midstream on the path to the normalization of ties.
As the results showed, even if there was such a scheme it didn't succeed. The Japanese people are delighted with the reunion, but they aren't gullible enough to transfer that delight to support for the ruling party. A few spoilsports tried to bring up the reunion's estimated huge cost to the nation, but the citizens don't seem to care. "At last, a meaningful use for our tax money," faxed one woman after TBS solicited comments from viewers.