Obama arrives in Japan for tension-filled Asia trip

FE Team | Published: April 24, 2014 00:00:00 | Updated: November 30, 2026 06:01:00

TOKYO, Apr 23, (agencies) :. US President Barack Obama landed in Tokyo Wednesday to launch an Asian tour dedicated to reinvigorating his policy of "rebalancing" US foreign policy towards a dynamic Asia.
Obama landed aboard Air Force One to begin a state visit to Japan, which comes as regional tensions boil over maritime territorial disputes and fears that North Korea could soon carry out a new nuclear test.
The president touched down a day after nearly 150 lawmakers paid homage at a controversial Tokyo war shrine seen by neighbouring nations as a symbol of Japan's brutal imperialist past, and shortly after the prime minister made a shrine offering.
Days earlier, China seized a huge Japanese freighter over what a Shanghai court says are unpaid bills relating to Japan's 1930s occupation of vast swathes of the country.
In the seas to the southwest, boats from China and Japan spar for ownership of a small chain of islands. And an ever-unpredictable North Korea-which has denounced the presidential tour as "reactionary and dangerous"-appears to be trying to seize the spotlight with preparations for a fourth nuclear test.
Despite the increasingly tense security situation, getting top regional US allies Japan and South Korea-Obama's next destination-to talk to each other is tricky.
South Korean President Park Geun-Hye and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe have met just once since both came to power over a year ago, and only then when the US leader cajoled them into a choreographed photo op.
East Asia is a tumultuous region with a multitude of fractures that the US has done little to mend over the last half-century, said Christian Wirth, a research fellow at Griffith University in Australia.
Meanwhile: US President Barack Obama has assured Japan that islands at the centre of its territorial dispute with China are covered by a bilateral defence treaty.
In an interview ahead of his Asian tour, Mr Obama said the US would oppose any attempt to undermine Japan's control over the islands.
US officials have made such comments in the past, but this is the first time Mr Obama has given such explicit support.
He arrived in Japan on Wednesday ahead of stops in three other Asian nations.
China's foreign ministry has said it opposed the islands being covered by the defence treaty.
"The so-called US-Japan alliance is a bilateral arrangement from the Cold War and ought not to harm China's territorial sovereignty and reasonable rights," spokesman Qin Gang said in Beijing during a regular press briefing.
Mr Obama is not going to Beijing, but relations with China are expected to dominate his meetings with regional leaders