Tokyo had been around for only three years when young naval officers charged in and assassinated Prime Minister Tsuyoshi Inukai in 1932. Four years later, Prime Minister Keisuke Okada was forced to hide in a closet during another attempted coup d’état, which killed five and left bullet holes that still pepper the building’s Art Deco facade.
The bad energy became transpacific when, in 1992, U.S. President George H.W. Bush became ill during a banquet here, vomiting onto the lap of Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa before passing out. Despite a reported exorcism by Shinto priests, an association with malevolent spirits was sealed, and the residence went unoccupied for nine years until Prime Minister Fumio Kishida moved in soon after taking power in October 2021.
“I have been warned by my predecessors that you will encounter ghosts in this building,” Kishida, 65, tells TIME in an exclusive interview inside the red-carpeted residence, gazing around at the expressionist wall motifs, which include at least one rather menacing concrete gargoyle. “Of course, it is an old building, so I hear sounds from time to time. But fortunately, I have yet to encounter a ghost.”
Kishida is preoccupied by more earthly issues. In Japan, he has launched a “new model of capitalism” to grow the middle class through redistributive policies. Overseas, he has set about revolutionizing the East Asian nation’s foreign relations: soothing historical grievances with South Korea, strengthening security alliances with the U.S. and others, and boosting defense spending by over 50%. Buoyed by a White House eager for influential partners to check China’s growing clout, Kishida has set about turning the world’s No. 3 economy back into a global power with a military presence to match.
この記事は Time の May 22 - 29, 2023 (Double Issue) 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
すでに購読者です ? サインイン
この記事は Time の May 22 - 29, 2023 (Double Issue) 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
すでに購読者です? サインイン
Kate Winslet Puts Lee Miller in the Frame - Kate Winslet loves tables. She loves them so much that the Oscar-winning actor collects them.
Kate Winslet loves tables. She loves them so much that the Oscar-winning actor collects them. There is nothing fancy about these antiques, but they enchant her. "It's the knots and the whorls, the shape and feel," she says. "They can feel like old friends, and there is something emotionally charging about an old table that comes with a history-I find imagining what that might be enormous fun."
Alfonso Cuarón Goes Long - The Oscar-winning filmmaker finds pathos in our lonely present in his first TV miniseries
A perceptive, generous-spirited child draws on her imagination when she's subjected to the cruelty of a boarding-school headmistress. A lone astronaut, cradled in a damaged space capsule and having lost any hope of returning to Earth, experiences a hallucination that saves her life. A young household servant, abandoned by the man who's gotten her pregnant, miscarries-though his betrayal helps her define what family truly means to her. Loneliness, so universal it has virtually become trademarked the Human Condition, is everywhere in art, and in life: we tend to fetishize it, or at least dab it with a perfume of sentimentality. But Alfonso Cuarón, now more than 30 years into a wide-ranging career that spans pictures like the Frances Hodgson Burnett adaptation A Little Princess, the space reverie Gravity, and the memoir-as-film drama Roma, is more interested in subtle emotional textures, in gradations of feeling that are always specific to the character at hand yet also joltingly recognizable. And now he brings his big-screen, big-story gifts to a limited series, an adaptation of Renée Knight's 2015 psychological thriller Disclaimer.
TIME 100 NEXT The World's Rising Stars - Innovators
From the halls of power to recording studios and science labs, these rising stars are remaking the world while defining the next generation of leadership
TIME 100 NEXT The World's Rising Stars - Leaders
From the halls of power to recording studios and science labs, these rising stars are remaking the world while defining the next generation of leadership
TIME 100 NEXT The World's Rising Stars - Advocates
From the halls of power to recording studios and science labs, these rising stars are remaking the world while defining the next generation of leadership
TIME 100 NEXT The World's Rising Stars - Phenoms
From the halls of power to recording studios and science labs, these rising stars are remaking the world while defining the next generation of leadership
TIME 100 NEXT The World's Rising Stars - Artists
From the halls of power to recording studios and science labs, these rising stars are remaking the world while defining the next generation of leadership
THE NEW APPRENTICE
J.D. Vance's juggling act
Fear in Lebanon, and a new front
FIRST, ON SEPT. 17, THERE WERE exploding pagers.
The hunt for life on a moon of Jupiter begins
NEARLY HALF A BILLION MILES FROM EARTH, A WORLD may be stirring.