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Obama heads to Japan for first Asia tour
AFP - 2 hours 17 minutes ago
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Obama heads to Japan for first Asia tour
TOKYO (AFP) - – US President Barack Obama kicks off his first tour of Asia on Friday with a visit to Japan, Washington's closest ally in a region increasingly dominated by rising giant China.
On his four-nation tour, Obama will seek to counter charges that America's influence in the world's most populous region is fading amid its domestic concerns and the distraction of US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The US leader will attend the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Singapore and meet Southeast Asian leaders before heading to China for three days and wrappinmg up his trip in South Korea.
In Japan, where a new centre-left government took power two months ago, both sides will seek to smooth over a row on US bases and stress shared goals on climate change, the war in Afghanistan and a desire for a nuclear weapons-free world.
Obama is to meet Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, who took office after a landslide election win ended half a century of conservative rule and has vowed continued but "more equal" ties with Washington.
Hatoyama has said he may scrap an unpopular plan to build a new US military base on the southern Okinawa island, and that he will end a naval refuelling mission that has since 2001 supported the US campaign in Afghanistan.
Stressing humanitarian aid over military support, his government this week pledged five billion dollars in assistance for Afghanistan to help stabilise the war-torn country that is Obama's biggest foreign policy challenge.
Hatoyama, despite a more assertive stance towards the superpower, has voiced admiration for Obama and stressed similarities between their Democratic parties, which both defeated conservative governments on a promise of change.
The leaders were expected to agree to joint efforts to battle climate change and the spread of nuclear weapons, including the threat posed by North Korea which has in the past test-fired missiles across the Japanese islands.
"The president will first thank them for their renewed commitment to Afghanistan," said White House spokesman Robert Gibbs aboard Air Force One, heading to Tokyo from Alaska.
"They'll talk about the international economy, climate change as well as North Korea and non-proliferation."
Japan's top government spokesman Hirofumi Hirano said: "I hope the summit will be an opportunity to enhance relations in trust between our prime minister and the president. That's our top priority.
"At the same time, we would like to reach concrete agreements. The environment and economic issues, as well as our long-term perspective for Japan-US relations will be on the agenda."
The United States has been a key influence in Japan since its military "Black Ships" ended its centuries of self-imposed isolation in the mid-1800s.
World War II in the Pacific started with Japan's 1941 attack on Pearl Harbour and ended days after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, leading to the US post-war occupation of Japan.
A legacy of that era is a strong American military presence, with 47,000 troops in the country, more than half of them on Okinawa, where many residents have long pushed for them to go home.
Hatoyama's government has pledged to review a 2006 agreement to realign US forces in Japan, especially a plan to build a new air base in a coastal area of Okinawa, where 20,000 anti-base activists protested last Sunday.
More anti-US rallies were expected Friday in Tokyo, where some 16,000 police were deployed to ensure security during Obama's visit.
Obama, in a Japanese TV interview days before his visit, said he understood that the new government would "re-examine how to move forward in a new environment" but urged the Hatoyama government to stick to the pact.
"I'm confident that once the review is completed they will conclude that the alliance that we have, the base arrangements that have been discussed, all those things serve the interest of Japan and that they will continue," he said.
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