Yukio Hatoyama, the man who would be sworn in as Japan’s next prime minister should his Democratic party overcome the country’s long-ruling Liberal Democratic party in elections this Sunday, penned an extremely provocative, borderline anti-American, and just plain creepy op-ed in the New York Times earlier this week. Perhaps the only mitigating factor is that, per the byline, the article was originally published, in a somewhat longer form, in the Japanese journal Voice. Otherwise, for a politician on the precipice of becoming the leader of a major world power and close American ally to so arrogantly criticize American policy and America’s prospects in the pages of an American newspaper is inexplicable. Hatoyama writes that we must recognize globalization as a failure and “return to the idea of fraternity”: