Understanding XにYを頼む > ... > The committee decided to ask Hashimoto to become president I found this phrase a bit confusing. Both verbs in this sentence can take both and at the same time. I think must go with in this case since XY means "decide on Y as X" and "decided on asking the president as Hashimoto" makes no sense. That leaves me with how to understand . So XY means "ask/request Y of X" and I get "request president of Hashimoto". That makes no sense. I think I'd have been happy with . Is this grammatical/natural? Is just a shorter way of saying this? Have I completely misparsed everything? So assuming I have understood this correctly what kind of objects can take? An after thought: If I translate as "presidency" rather than "president" then all my problems go away. I wonder if this is the way to think about it.

> I think I'd have been happy with . Is this grammatical/natural?

It's good but " **** " is more natural.

> Is just a shorter way of saying this?

Yes. can simply take a noun, e.g. (order sushi / ask them to make sushi) and (leave them to do the rest). Usually we don't distinguish 'presidency' and 'president', so I assume can be translated into both of them and vice versa.