Back to Gideon RachmanBy Mure Dickie, FT Japan bureau chief
Here’s an interesting question ahead of Barack Obama’s arrival in Tokyo on Friday for the first leg of his Asia tour: would Mao Zedong have approved of the US president’s itinerary? Or would he have worried that Obama was not doing enough to make sure that Japan felt loved?
It might be surprising to some, but the late Chinese chairman was an astute observer of the impact that trip scheduling could have on sensitive Japanese sentiment. So much so that he discussed the matter in forceful terms with Henry Kissinger way back in 1971.
I wasn’t following international affairs back then, but I remember well the doubt and concern that swept some Japanese policymaking circles in 1998 when then US president Bill Clinton skipped Tokyo on an Asian tour that included a long multi-stop visit to China. That itinerary was taken as the sign that that the Japan-bashing of the 1980s trade wars had morphed into an even more worrying “Japan passing”.
Mao would certainly have chastised Clinton, had the great dictator not long since been transformed into a waxy corpse on grisly show in a Tiananmen Square mausoleum.
As Kenneth Pyle describes in his 2007 book “Japan Rising”, Mao lectured Kissinger on his slighting attitude to the status-sensitive Japanese leaders, ticking off his US visitor for not spending enough time in Tokyo when he visited the region.
“You only talked with them for one day…and that is not good for their face,” Mao said.
As Pyle points out, Mao knew well that Japan was not to be taken lightly and should not be made to feel neglected.
So what of Obama? The US president has trimmed his time in Japan to a mere 24 hours and plans to linger much longer when he gets to China – a fact already noted with dismay by some Japanese observers.
But I think Mao might have forgiven the Obama administration its scheduling (which involved a late cut of a day in Japan because of the recent US military base shooting). Japanese officials I’ve talked with in recent days didn’t seem too upset.
Crucially, the Obama administration has taken pains not to “pass Japan”. And Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama himself has stressed that Japan is Obama’s first Asia stop (as indeed it was for Hilary Clinton on her first Asia tour in office). And the first foreign leader to win a coveted White House meeting with Obama was Hatoyama’s predecessor Taro Aso. Put together, that should be enough face for the moment.
This blog covers a variety of topics from US foreign policy to European politics and the Middle East - and whatever else happens to be in the news or catch my attention. I joined the FT as chief foreign affairs commentator in 2006, after a 15-year career at The Economist which included stints as a correspondent in Brussels, Bangkok and Washington. I write a weekly column on foreign affairs, which appears in the paper on Tuesdays. Occasionally my FT colleagues contribute posts to this blog.
