When Sosuke Uno became Prime Minister in 1989, the LDP was reeling from an affair known as the Recruit scandal. The dweeby-looking Uno hardly seemed the man to restore confidence, and support for him started ebbing away almost immediately. The killer blow, however, was struck by his former geisha mistress, Mitsuko Nakanishi, whose revelations about the PM’s arrogance and stinginess were picked up by the media. Divorced before becoming a geisha, Nakanishi clearly had an agenda of her own, telling reporters that Japanese women have “always been beaten down by men and have always quietly endured the pain.”

by Chip Boles