Instead of overseeing the government’s management of the outbreak, Hirotaka Akamatsu, the minister of agriculture, forestry, and fishing, took a long trip to Cuba to meet Raúl Castro – a very strange decision given strained US-Japan relations. That trip further cemented the notion that the Hatoyama government was at root anti-American in the mindless way that former South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun was.