By Mure Dickie, FT Japan bureau chief

The run-up to Barack Obama’s first visit as president to Tokyo was overshadowed by the 20th anniversary of the Japanese emperor’s enthronement and the recent arrest of one of the nation’s most wanted men, but the trip should at least bring a welcome boost to his book sales.

With Obama scheduled to show off his celebrated rhetorical skills in a major policy speech on Saturday, publisher Asahi Press is hoping for renewed demand for its once-popular bi-lingual collections of his speeches.

Fans and English students sent sales soaring after Obama’s election. In a trend that mirrors Obama’s falling domestic popularity, however, all have since slipped out of the best-seller list.

The passing of Obama passion helps explain why popular attention this week has focused more on the anniversary of Emperor Akihito’s enthronement in 1989 and on the ongoing interrogation of the long-sought suspect in the 2007 killing of a UK woman.

Yet Obama remains popular in East Asia’s most influential democracy. Indeed, a banker at a major Japanese institution jokes that the US should tap the president’s personal brand to help shore up its fiscal foundations by issuing yen-denominated “Obama Bonds”.

“Even Japanese retail [investors] would buy,” the banker says.

Some of his biggest fans hail from the previously little-known city of Obama in central Fukui prefecture. A small group of Obama supporters from Obama city are in Tokyo to welcome him by wearing Hawaiian Aloha shirts and waving a welcome banner.

Inoue Koyoan, president of a food company based in Obama city, expects sales of tribute wheat crackers bearing the president’s image to jump to around 1,000 in November from the 700 to 800 recorded in recent months.

Juichi Hemmi, head of a local brewery that markets President Obama sake is grateful to the president for putting his town on Japan’s mental map – and his own enthusiasm has survived the president’s falling approval rates.

“I think he’s doing his best,” Hemmi says. “I really approve of him for taking on big challenges such as reforming healthcare.”

Lindsay Whipp, FT Tokyo markets correspondent, contributed to this blog

By 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. Continue reading "How would Mao Zedong have seen Obama’s Asia tour?"

By Alan Beattie, FT World Trade Editor

To the usual putdowns of the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation - “four adjectives in search of a noun” and “A Perfect Excuse to Chat” - my colleague Kevin Brown has added another ahead of this week’s big meeting: “a grouping that speaks for half the global economy but decides almost nothing”. If anything, this is a mild understatement.

Still, Apec has been doing its best to prove its relevance: here is a paper arguing that Apec members see more trade integration amongst themselves than do non-Apec members. It’s careful not to delineate a firm causal link, and just as well - even as it is the paper verges on blatant goalhanging in inviting us to infer some relationship.

More likely is that Apec was lucky enough to include all the countries (Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, later on China and Vietnam, etc) that organised themselves into the “Factory Asia” disaggregated supply chain - and which was focused on western markets. And not even the actual bilateral trade agreements in the region (as opposed to Apec’s “voluntary” i.e. toothless one) contributed much to that process either (see previous link). Meanwhile,  pace one very vocal advocate, the chances of turning Apec into a proper free trade zone are the square root of Doha.

The best reason for Apec, one east Asian official once confided to me sotto voce, was that it forced the US president to travel to Asia at least once a year. But surely any good CEO visits his biggest suppliers and creditors regularly in any case?

By Geoff Dyer, FT China bureau chief

Barack Obama is preparing to get on Air Force One en route to Japan to start his first presidential visit to Asia. Yet one of the centerpieces of his three days in China, a town-hall style meeting in Shanghai, is also still up in the air.

The White House had hoped the Monday morning forum would be President Obama’s one big chance to try and communicate directly with young Chinese people.

But as of this morning, according to a source familiar with the negotiations, there was still no agreement with the Chinese authorities on who would be present or how the question-and-answer session would work. And, most importantly for the White House, there was also no decision on whether it would be broadcast live on television and on the internet.

There is some precedent here. When Bill Clinton visited China in 1998, he ended up appearing live on radio and television on four separate occasions, including a discussion with then Chinese president Jiang Zemin when they debated religion, human rights and the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest movement. An FT report on the Clinton visit noted that by allowing the live broadcasts, “the Chinese government offered tantalising glimpses of prospects of greater political openness”.

Presidential visits always involve last-minute haggling, especially in China. But if the event ends up being cancelled, which my source says is possible, it would be hugely embarrassing to both sides – Obama would look as if he was muffled by his hosts while China would come across as being afraid of its own people.

By Victor Mallet, Madrid correspondent

President Barack Obama is doubtless busy right now, what with his forthcoming China visit, the Afghan war, US healthcare reform and the fragile global economy. But I am afraid there is another yet another crisis that neither he nor any other world leader can ignore for much longer: piracy on the high seas.

Pirates operating from the coast of Somalia are no longer a little local problem in the Gulf of Aden, to be solved by a few more navy patrols, merchant seamen wielding fire hoses and the payment of the occasional million-dollar ransom to a pirate king.

On Monday, pirates opened fire on a Hong Kong-flagged oil tanker, the BW Lion, 1,000 nautical miles east of Mogadishu. Although they failed to seize the ship, the long-range foray was a dramatic demonstration of the skills and resources these modern buccaneers now have at their disposal. Continue reading "The growing danger of piracy on the high seas"

By Roula Khalaf, the FT’s Middle East editor

It is easy to dismiss Mahmoud Abbas’s decision not to contest the next Palestinian presidential election as a capricious cry for attention.

Since taking the helm of the Palestinian Authority after the 2004 death of Yasser Arafat, he has often looked uncomfortable in the job and has frequently threatened to resign.

Under his leadership, the PA has been a far less corrupt administration and one genuinely committed to the peaceful pursuit of an end to Israeli occupation. But it has also presided over the worst divisions in the Palestinian national movement’s history. And its purpose – to negotiate the creation of an independent state – has looked increasingly hopeless.

The remainder of this article can be read here. Please post comments below.

Gideon is away on book writing leave… but he has been back in touch about the following study from the European Council on Foreign Relations. He says it is “one of those rare things - a report on the transatlantic relationship that is actually worth reading.”

Here is an excerpt:

As EU leaders head to Washington for their transatlantic summit tomorrow, an unsentimental President Obama has already lost patience with Europe.  In a post-American world, the United States knows it needs effective partners.  At present, Europe lacks coherence and purpose. If Europe cannot step up, the US will look for other partners to do business with. Read the report here.

Related reading:

Summit-hungry Europeans flock to a bemused Washington FT Brussels blog
Obama - in depth news, comment and analysis, FT

I don’t think it is particularly surprising that the Obama administration has decided to drop the plans to build an anti-missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic. I remember, shortly before the election, an Obama foreign-policy adviser describing the plans to me as a “system that won’t work, against a threat that doesn’t exist, paid for with money we don’t have.” I took that as a hint.

Missile defence has, in any case, always been a Republican obsession, dating back to Reagan and “Star wars”. Abandoning the plan has financial and diplomatic attractions for Obama. Most obviously, it removes a bone of contention (or a “rotting corpse” as one Russian diplomat colourfully put it) between the Kremlin and the White House. It might now make it easier for Obama to make progress on nuclear arms-reduction  - and perhaps persuade the Russians not to veto a new round of sanctions on Iran.

If, however, the Russians react by becoming more assertive and demanding - for example over Georgia and Ukraine - then Obama could end up looking foolish. There will certainly now be heightened anxiety in Central Europe. The Poles and the Czechs were, initially, not that keen on the anti-missile scheme. But they won’t like the implication that America has backed off, in the face of Russian pressure - or, even worse, that the Nato military committment to eastern Europe is anything other than rock solid. Recent opinion polls show that respect for America has risen in western Europe since Obama came in, but fallen in the countries of the former Soviet bloc. American diplomats have a big job of reassurance to do there.