Koizumi's tactics - to seize East Asia's first summit

Wednesday, December 14, 2005;

This forum, East Asia's first summit was supposed to be a tug-of-war between Japan and China since Japan invited India while China called Russia to increase more influence than each other.

Everyone expected that it would result in inargural one as a first forum in asia despite it would end up with the leaders of China and Japan never seeing each other's face.



Japanese Prime minister, Koizumi, must have planned this to happen as he wanted a light contact with Chinese PM; He suddenly asked Wen Jiabao, Chinesee PM, to hand him Wen's pen instead of using his own pen while every leader was signing in the ceremony.



Puzzled by his begging, Wen looked frozen a while until Abdullah Badawi, the prime minister of Malaysia and the host of this forum, urged him to hand the pen to Koizumi.



The whole participants including audience understood Koizumi's message at once and applauded the result.

This is one of his typical traps; if Wen refuses, he would give a bitter impression in front of the rest of 15 leaders. Wen barely saved his face by smiling when handing the pen to Koizumi.

At the same time, Koizumi succeeded in appealing to the world that Japan can work on reconciling the confilict between the two big countries, reassuring Abdullah Badawi, the host of this summit with the smiling ending. The fact that his casual performance made the audience smile let everyone knew that his influence was the most.

Did any Japanese Prime Minister up until Koizumi tried to make Japan undersood ? Most of them ended up with exposing their ugly and oily small figure like Yoda.



Knowing the story, Japanese right-wingers dissipated stress in message boards such as yahoo or 2ch, although only one TV news program, NEWS23, reported this with frustrated faces. FYI, NEWS23 is known as a pacifistic program. They obviously didn't welcome anything like this, leading up to Japan countering the threat of China. Note that there is a huge difference in opinion between TV and netizens.
(NNN23 reported it as well after I wrote this article.)

Chinese netizens, on the other hands, didn't hesitate showing their anger at Koizumi's performance, claiming that it was too aggressive. The story seemed to be reported more in detail than Japan.

link:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4526736.stm