VOX POPULI: Brown's gaffe catches a campaign off guard

Kyoto has many famous public gardens. Poet Tadashi Amano (1909-1993), who lived there, observed: "You can tell the quality of a garden by what you see when you peek out from the lavatory window. That's where you catch the garden off its guard, so to speak."

Amano's insight is quoted in "Hi no Yojin" (Beware of fires), a book by Hidetaro Sugimoto, a scholar of literature.

True, every garden is designed to look aesthetically pleasing where it is readily visible, but its "real face" shows where the eye is unlikely to rest. Caught off guard, to borrow Amano's expression, the garden reveals its true nature. And that's how you can determine whether the garden was put together cheaply just for show, or if its beauty is genuine. I imagine the poet's observation referred to human nature as well.

It was this "view from the lavatory window" moment that inadvertently revealed British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's real nature.

On the stump for the May 6 general election, he stopped to chat with a woman supporter about immigration and other issues.

The prime minister was pleasant and courteous with her, but as soon as he got in his car and the door was closed, he muttered: "That was a disaster--they should never have put me with that woman ... she's just a sort of bigoted woman ... ." Brown had forgotten to remove a microphone that was pinned to his shirt.

Brown is neither glib nor affable, which has actually contributed to his public image as a sincere, no-nonsense type of person. But his open-microphone gaffe must have had the British people thinking, "Aha, now we know him for who he really is." I heard one newspaper even said the gaffe would finish Brown in politics.

Chivalry is big in Britain. But for the slighted woman, being called bigoted after the cordial encounter with the prime minister must have felt like being stabbed in the back. I can understand why a pundit described the prime minister's gaffe as the worst in British history by a campaigning politician.

Brown's Labor Party is locked in three-way combat with the Conservative Party and the surging Liberal Democrats, with Labor struggling in last place.

Should the traditional two-party system collapse in this election, Brown's gaffe will have become "historic" indeed. And when that happens, the prime minister can only blame himself, not the microphone.

--The Asahi Shimbun, May 2

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Vox Populi, Vox Dei is a popular daily column that takes up a wide range of topics, including culture, arts and social trends and developments. Written by veteran Asahi Shimbun writers, the column provides useful perspectives on and insights into contemporary Japan and its culture.