Yasunari Kawabata had Parkinson's disease), a possible illicit love affair, or the shock caused by the suicide of his friend Yukio Mishima in 1970. Unlike Mishima, Kawabata left no note, and since (again unlike Mishima) he had not discussed significantly in his writings the topic of taking his own life, his motives remain unclear. However, his Japanese biographer, Takeo Okuno, has related how he had nightmares about Mishima for two or three hundred nights in a row, and was incessantly haunted by the specter of Mishima. In a persistently depressed state of mind, he would tell friends during his last years that
U.S. nuclear weapons in Japan Japan. The Liberal Democratic Party had been in power for the last 50 years. The long-ruling conservatives repeatedly denied the existence of pacts. In an effort by Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama to restore public trust, the panel was set up by Japan's newly elected Democratic Party and its creation was motivated by an effort to increase transparency about the secret nuclear agreements with the U.S. Japan's Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada revealed the findings of the panel and admitted that previous governments had lied to the Japanese public, over decades, about nuclear weapons agreements with the U.S. in violation of the