Did Japan’s first lady pretend not to speak English?
Donald Trump says she didn’t even say hello
Akie Abe, first lady of Japan and wife of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, has spoken English many times in public, fluently, with only the slightest accent.
She chatted, for example, about a shared admiration for star base- ball pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka ( then of the Boston Red Sox), at the White House with president George W. Bush and his wife, Laura, in 2007. She has chatted with Laureen Harper, had cocktails with Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, spoken to business leaders in New York, and to a Virginia elementary school audience with Michelle Obama.
She has even met Donald and Melania Trump a couple of times, earlier this year at Andrews Air Force Base, followed by a weekend at Trump’s Mar- a- Lago resort in Florida, where the two men played golf.
And yet last week at the G20 summit in Germany, when the opera performance ended, Trump says she was seated next to him for dinner and simply sat in silence, rather than endure the presidential chit chat.
She appears to have pretended not to speak English, pulling off one of the greatest tricks in the history of dinner diplomacy.
If so, Abe had a plausible reason as Trump has a long record of disrespectful behaviour toward women, most recently an aggressive handshake and lewd comment about the body of Brigitte Macron, the first l ady of France. Evidence for this shockingly bold but simple gambit comes from the president himself in an interview this week with The New York Times.
“So I was seated next to the wife of Prime Minister Abe, who I think is a terrific guy, and she’s a terrific woman, but doesn’t speak English,” Trump told reporter Maggie Haberman.
“Like nothing, right? Like zero?” Haberman asked.
“Like not ‘ hello,’ ” said Trump.
Haberman said t hat must have been awkward and Trump agreed, noting the dinner went well over 90 minutes. He did have a Japanese interpreter, but indicated he did not make much use of the service, eating an entire banquet without saying a word to the woman seated beside him.
“But I enjoyed the evening with her and she’s really a l ovely woman and I enjoyed — the whole thing was good,” he said.
It was good until 10 days later when the White House revealed that Trump actually left his seat to speak privately to Vladimir Putin. Trump said the pair spoke for about 15 minutes.
Other accounts say it was closer to an hour. Putin used his own interpreter and there is no U. S. record of what was said other than the U. S. president’s assertion that they discussed Americans’ adoption of Russian children.
Abe definitely speaks English, as her many public appearances in the West have demonstrated.
As the youngest Japanese first lady since the Second World War, she has become a popular counterpart to her older, hawkish husband, with whom she frequently disagrees in public, such as over nuclear power, which she opposes.
They were married in 1987 when she was 25 and working for a large advertising firm and he was 32. Earlier, she had written a master’s thesis on education in Burma. They have no children.