"Loopy," "hapless," "embarrassing" — such is the world's, and Japan's, verdict on the short unhappy prime ministership of Yukio Hatoyama. In retrospect, this 21st-century Japanese Don Quixote seems to have been doomed to failure from the start. What he attempted was honorable, but impossible. What was this naturally compassionate man doing in politics? Answer: Learning the hard way that politics and compassion don't mix.
In his maiden speech to the Diet last October, Hatoyama, coarchitect of an electoral landslide that has almost certainly buried one-party rule in Japan once and for all, set out what he hoped to achieve as prime minister.
"There is no end," he said, "to the number of people who take their own lives because they cannot find in society even a humble place to which they belong, and yet politics and government are thoroughly insensitive to this fact. . . . My primary mission is to rectify this aberrant situation."