Japan’s next PM to meet Asian envoys

JAPAN: Japan’s incoming prime minister was Friday set to hold talks with the ambassadors of China and South Korea as his party looks to promote regional ties and its long-term aim of an Asian community.

Beijing’s ambassador to Tokyo, Cui Tiankai, was to visit Yukio Hatoyama, the leader of the centre-left Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), which ousted the conservative government in a sweeping election victory on Sunday.

South Korean ambassador Kwon Chul-Hyun was also due to meet Hatoyama, who is set to take over as prime minister on September 16, at his party headquarters. The two envoys are the first Asian ambassadors to meet Hatoyama, 62, since his party’s landslide victory over the long-ruling conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) of Prime Minister Taro Aso. The premier-in-waiting met with the US and Russian ambassadors on Thursday.

The DPJ has signalled the new government will reach out to Asian neighbours and seek to ease distrust still stirred by memories of Japan’s war-time past. Hatoyama wrote about “overcoming nationalism through an East Asian community” in an article that was published last month in Japan’s “Voice” magazine and later reprinted in condensed form in the United States.

While noting Japan’s security alliance with the United States would continue to be “the cornerstone” of Japanese diplomacy, Hatoyama wrote that Japan “must not forget our identity as a nation located in Asia.”

“I believe that the East Asian region, which is showing increasing vitality in its economic growth and even closer mutual ties, must be recognised as Japan’s basic sphere of being,” he wrote.

Tokyo, Friday, AFP