Monday, June 08, 2009

Do You Know Tadamori Oshima?

I shared a most informative afternoon with a foreign correspondent today. I was supposed to sing for my lunch and I did, but I got as good as I gave. I also got a half bottle of nice red wine, so today, I’ll dispense with my usual fact-checking and just do a run-through of the thoughts that I had…while I sleep off the alcohol in bits and pieces.
Tadamori Oshima is one of those unsung LDP lifers, a competent 60-something who toils in the trenches on party chores and is rewarded with the less glamorous cabinet assignments in between. As Diet Affairs Committee Chairman, he goes up every day against his opposition counterpart Kenji Yamaoka, the closest thing to a lifer that the DPJ has, with whom he obviously shares a mutual, if grudging, admiration. And he’s earning it, as First Mate on a sinking ship.

2 comments:

MTC said...

Oshima is also the only member of the LDP top ranks who can express himself in sturdy, lucid paragraphs.

Jun Okumura said...

Hi, MTC. Actually, Shoichi Nakagawa, while never quite a Barack Obama, was vastly underrated as a comprehensible paragraphist.

When he was sober.