The World

By Edward Luce, FT Washington bureau chief, in Tokyo

One of the benefits of having a multiracial president is that he can identify with people all over the place. Barack Obama has that in endless dollops – the boy from Hawaii, who grew up in Indonesia and made Chicago his home.

Two key elements of Mr Obama’s biography have yet to enter the presidential itinerary. The first is a visit to Jakarta, which is promised for some time next year. Second is a more hazardous trip to Kenya, home of Mr Obama’s father, where the punitive local politics make an Air Force One landing too controversial to put on the schedule at this stage.

So it came as a surprise to many of the Americans traveling with Mr Obama on Saturday – if not to his Japanese hosts – that the US president even has a connection to Japan, although a rather tenuous one compared to his other ties.

The young Barry Obama apparently took a vacation in Japan as a child. During a speech in Tokyo on Saturday, he said his mother took him to Kamakura, “where I looked up at that centuries-old symbol of peace and tranquility – the great bronze Amida Buddha”.

The bit that really tickled the audience was the following line: “As a child, I was more focused on the matcha ice cream,” he said to laughter, referring to the green tea ice cream.

“But I have never forgotten the warmth and hospitality that the Japanese people showed a young American far from home.”

That was not all. America’s rainbow president even paid compliments to the citizens of Obama – a relatively obscure Japanese city more famous for producing lacquer chopsticks. Presumably the people were glowing with all the attention.

However thin, it is small connections like this that allow a speaker to establish a connection with the audience. As ever, the contrast with the resolutely Anglo-Saxon George W. Bush, who had apparently been golfing in Scotland and attended a funeral in west Africa in his father’s stead (but little else) was striking.

Lest anyone think that Mr Obama will fail to pull off the same feat in China, a country on his Asia tour that he has never visited, he reminded his Japanese hosts on Saturday that his half-sister, Maya, is married to a Chinese-Canadian.

“So the Pacific Rim has helped shape my view of the world,” Mr Obama concluded. Along with the Atlantic, the Mid-West, the horn of Africa, Harvard Law School…