Source: New York Times

TOKYO — Scrambling to mend fences with his country’s biggest ally, Japan’s next leader, Yukio Hatoyama, told the United States ambassador on Thursday that the American alliance was the basis of Japanese foreign policy, hours after he said the same thing by phone to President Obama.

In the phone call early Thursday morning with the White House, Mr. Hatoyama said he reassured Mr. Obama that he would not change the alliance with the United States. It was his first conversation with the president since his party defeated Japan’s long-governing incumbent party in Sunday’s landmark election.

“We reaffirmed that the Japan-U.S. alliance is the foundation” of Japanese foreign policy, Mr. Hatoyama told reporters.

Mr. Hatoyama was seeking to quell worries that his slightly left-of-center government, elected after more than a half-century of rule by the conservative, pro-American Liberal Democratic Party, will pull Japan away from the United States.

During the campaign, his party, the Democratic Party, promised to seek a more “equal partnership” with Washington and build closer ties with China and other Asia countries. But the biggest problems were caused by an essay by the Stanford-educated Mr. Hatoyama, published in the International Herald Tribune and on the Web site of The New York Times, that called Japan’s ailing economy a victim of American-led globalization.



Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/04/world/asia/04japan.html

Which means "I understood what you said" in Japanese.

I have been abducted by aliens, says Japan's first lady

"While my body was asleep, I think my soul rode on a triangular-shaped UFO and went to Venus," she explains in the tome she published last year. "It was a very beautiful place, and it was very green."

When the new Japanese first lady related her adventures to her then husband, he told her flatteningly that it was probably just a dream. But she is confident that Yukio, the man now entrusted with the task of hauling Japan out of its deepest recession, would have reacted very differently. "My current husband has a different way of thinking.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/i-have-been-abducted-by-aliens-says-japans-first-lady-1780888.html