Teacher ShellePrime Minister under fire for fashion choices
 Tokyo, Japan (CNN) -- Japan's prime minister is in a world of political hurt right now. The latest poll numbers by the country's largest daily newspaper, The Yomiuri Shimbun, showed 24 percent of those polled approve of Yukio Hatoyama's performance, a nine-point drop from a month earlier, while 67 percent disapprove of him. So when Hatoyama recently opened the doors of his official residence to serve Japanese barbeque to ordinary voters for an event called the "Real Hato Café," his earnest effort to talk to ordinary citizens didn't grab the attention of critic Don Konishi -- but his choice of clothing did. A multi-colored, throwback to the 1980s fashion disaster, Konishi explained, as he noted the prime minister's red, yellow, green, purple and blue-checked plaid shirt. The critic wrote a public condemnation about the shirt in a national magazine and warned the country that the multi-colored get-up represented what the poll numbers already show: Hatoyama is out of touch. "This shirt comes from the '80s or '90s. His ideas and philosophy are old. Japan is facing a crisis and we can't overcome it with a prime minister like this." The poll numbers are not lost on the man who is the subject of the study. Hatoyama told reporters: "I take it seriously that my approval ratings are down significantly. But I'm not going to quit." source: www.cnn.com |