Prime Minister Taro Aso's support rate keeps plummeting due to public doubts over his leadership ability and a series of policy flip-flops, but he may deserve a bit of kudos for brightening up one area of the nation's dismal economy.

But it is not the cash handout plan that the 68-year-old leader has touted as one of his key economic stimulus measures that should win him public credit. It is his repeated misreading of the kanji in Japanese texts.

Books introducing how to correctly pronounce Japanese words and phrases written in kanji are currently all the rage in Japan, and publishers and bookstores largely attribute this sudden boom to Aso's recent bloopers in reading the characters during his political speeches.