Her willingness to engage in touchy issues may prove a particular headache for the government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, a conservative who has pledged to maintain close ties with Washington. Mr. Abe, who has 260,000 followers on Twitter, has been popular in Japan’s small but very vocal community of nationalist Web users.
At least one noted woman also spoke out on the dolphin hunt. A day after the ambassador’s post, Yoko Ono published an open letter to the fishermen to stop the killings she said have given Japan a bad name internationally. (Dolphin meat is prized in a limited number of places in Japan, but conservatives bridle at foreign dictates of what Japan should do.)
Despite the kerfuffle, Ms. Kennedy remains enormously popular in Japan, Mr. Spector and others say. Partly, this is because of the aura here that still surrounds the presidency of her father, John F. Kennedy, for whom many older Japanese feel an almost teary-eyed nostalgia. When Ms. Kennedy was named as ambassador, Japanese television stations repeatedly broadcast images of her as a little girl on her father’s lap, or standing forlornly at his funeral.
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