I’ll be brief with this one since I need to be out the door right away, but I just wanted to write this one down before leaving.
I was/am listening to Morimoto Takerō’s “Standby” radio show on TBS, and their weekly weather expert guy is on. For an interesting bit of trivia, this guest assembled data looking at the correlation between the hours of sunlight on the day a new government is formed, and the duration of that prime minister’s time in office.
It was quite hilarious, and while I didn’t pencil down any numbers, almost all the long-reigning prime ministers over the past couple decades assembled their cabinet on what turned out to be a very sunny day, and the opposite was true for short-run PM’s. This trend was constant and reliable, the guest explained, up until the ascent of Asō Tarō, in which the correlation went completely the other direction… potentially even reflecting that the sunlight hours/time in office relationship had been reversed. Both the Hatoyama and Asō governments were formed on extremely sunny days (8~9 hours)!
The government of Kan Naoto was formed yesterday. Hours of sunlight? Zero.
Hmm… if the reverse-trend theory is true, he may be in office forever! If not, I’ll check back here next week.
比叡山と延暦寺