The bonding of Japanese, CPAC and Tea Partiers

THE CURRENT ISSUE of Atlantic magazine tells us of a visit by some Japanese operatives to the Tea Party co-sponsored CPAC annual meeting in February. One of the visitors, Jay Aeba, is a leader of his country's right-wing Happiness Realization Party, which appears to be anything but happy about the way things are going back home; another, Yuya Watase, founded the Tokyo Tea Party, evidence of how quickly news spreads to other angry folks across the waters. Those who join the Happiness party, by the way, are known as "happies". Does that make more sense to you than it does to me?

Their mission was to learn some things about how American Tea Partiers denounce taxes, government and the current occupant of the Oval Office, all in the same breath. The report quotes Watase complaining that Japanese people who work for private companies are now "actually slaves of the government." Witnessing how the CPAC delegates riotously responded to each conference speaker, the Japanese guests were hopeful of stirring anti-government passions when they returned home to continue their work with the Tokyo Tea Party's slogan of "taxed enough already".

Back to the Happies: The Atlantic report notes that the Happiness Realization Party...is the "political arm of a new-wave religious movement called Happy Science, whose founder claims to be a reincarnation of Buddha."

Among other things, the Happies want to eliminate Japan's constitutional ban on waging war.

If they needed further inspiration, they got their money's worth from such bonding podium headliners as Marco Rubio, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin. And let us not overlook Allen West.

About the tea: The Boston Tea Party was not on the visitors approved list of positive talking points. Said Watase through a translator: "They threw away the tea, which is very valuable. Japanese people value tea. We would never throw it out; we would save it."

Of course, some anti-goverment protests might lose something in translation.