Obama’s first visit to Japan :

how Western European, US and Japanese media reflect their countries' diplomacies

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The new US President’s first visit to Japan certainly remains for the archipelago a major diplomatic event of the year 2009. How has it been covered by domestic and Western media ? The way they reported this significant news story, in fact, tells us a lot about Japan and Western countries’ diplomatic relations…

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Starting on the thirteenth of November, Barack H. Obama spent two days in the country. He met, the first day, the country’s new Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, president of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), which defeated the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in August 2009 general election after almost 54 years of governing ; like Obama, Hatoyama’s political program was based on a break with the previous rulers. The American President was, the following day, received by Japan’s Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko, and delivered a speech about US diplomacy toward Asia. He eventually left the country in order to attend Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) in Singapore, before spending three days in China, finishing his first visit to Asia in South Korea. Concerning Japan in particular, even though the summit had been highly anticipated, the fact that the relationships between the two countries were at this time taxed by the unresolved Marine Corps Air Futenma issue should not be omitted…

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Little coverage in Europe

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In Europe, news about Japan generally do not hit the headlines. French journalism, for instance, do not provide a very detailed coverage of Japanese politics and diplomacy : in the best cases, we can find information related to Japan in economic media. Even though DJP’s victory over LDP has caught the attention of media for a while, it seems that this revival of interest was not meant to last. French media discussed it as it was bringing an important change in Japanese politics, but it appeared that they did not care so much about what was occurring next. Thus, they doubtlessly covered Obama’s visit to Asia. But they mostly focused on… China. Even France 24 – which is supposed to deal with international news 24 hours a day – devoted only 15 seconds to Obama’s two days in Tokyo in its 12-minute weekly program “A week in Asia”. Certainly, there were at the same moment a few strains growing between Cambodia and Thailand (about Thaksin Shinawatra’s case) and attacks in Pakistan. But it is also true that the week after, the program gave to Obama’s talk on Internet liberties in front of Chinese students a better chance. In fact, should we watch the channel’s daily international press reviews at the time of the summit, we would not hear any word about Japan.

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The case of France in not singular : nowadays, most media prefer center on China, rather than on Japan. Can we really blame them ? How many events having global repercussions have been occurring in the archipelago through the last decade ? Not many. Japan may be one of the World’s major economic powers, only few people in Europe could name its current Prime Minister : certainly the reason why Japan is often depicted as being an economic giant and a “diplomatic and political dwarf”, leading to the idea of soft power.

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A fear of decline on the global stage

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There is at least one Western country whose media discussed intensively the event, since it was also the most concerned : the United States. Nevertheless, American cameras, microphones, pens and other keyboards did not attach so much importance to what was said, as their centre of attention has been Obama’s bow to Emperor Akihito (shaking hands at the same time), very negatively reported by US commentators for being considered as a non-American, humiliating sign of weakness and exaggerated deference.

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This is not the first time that US media have such fierce responds : in April 2009, through the G20 summit, the same kind of reactions had been following the President’s bow to Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah, as well as in 1994, Bill Clinton was criticized by the New York Times for the same gesture to the same Japanese Emperor. And even though an anonymous senior Obama administration official explained on politico.com that Obama was simply respecting the protocol, a contrast has been established with former US Vice President Dick Cheney, who met the Emperor in 2007 and simply shake hands. On CNN‘s program “State of the Union”, the conservative politician, pundit and commentator Bill Bennett declared : “It’s ugly. I don’t want to see it”, “We don’t defer to kings or emperors. The president of the United States is just another thing.”. A quite similar viewpoint was formulated on Fox News‘ Sunday program by William Kristol, another conservative political analyst and commentator : “I don’t know why President Obama thought that was appropriate. Maybe he thought it would play well in Japan. But it’s not appropriate for an American president to bow to a foreign one”, “I’ll bet if you look at pictures of world leaders over 20 years meeting the emperor in Japan, they don’t bow.”.

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Criticism on in-depth issues in Japan

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Yet, US media were the only ones to overreact after this bow. Japanese media started to pay heed to this gesture only after the controversy began in Uncle Sam’s country, since here, it seemed normal, underlining Obama’s good manners. Besides, it is quite interesting to read a few reactions from Japan’s English-speaking inhabitants on The Japan Times Online‘s “Readers in Council” section. While a person from Hiroshima (bearing an Anglo-Saxon name) claims that “American people need to grow up”, another one from Tokyo (clearly mentioning that he is American) tells that he feels “irritated at the coverage of this”, adding that “President Barack Obama was in the Emperor’s country” and that he was “acknowledging his guest status and being very respectful as we would expect a Japanese leader to be in Washington”… The Japan Times itself published an editorial emphasizing the worthlessness of such a contention, startled that it had become so excessive : “the American diplomacy is never without controversy, but who would have imagined that the standard protocol of a bow to the Japanese Emperor from U.S. President Barack Obama would have caused such a fuss ?”.

At the same time, the newspaper was making the statement that “bowing was the easy part”. Because beyond the bow, believe it or not, there have been through this visit some serious contents that Japanese media have reported much more in details than US’. These ones, in fact, were probably too engaged in debating Obama’s greeting to concentrate a little more on the questions of nuclear weapons, support for Afghanistan, climate changes, trade, North Korea, Obama’s reference to US-Japan alliance as “a centerpiece of our efforts in the region”, his recognition of visits to Hiroshima and Nagasaki as necessities, etc. Similarly, Japanese media did not forget to highlight the summit’s fails (US media did so too, but essentially for Obama’s three days in China) : thus, the Nikkei Weekly’s website indicated that it was ending “on a cordial note that glossed over the difficult realities entangling the countries’ relationship”, arguing for instance that Hatoyama and Obama only discussed matters for which they were agreeing, removing the Futenma issue from the agenda since it had been decided before to set up a panel of cabinet-level officials to deal with it. The meeting, in fact, is even depicted on the website as “exchanging diplomatic niceties to play up the strength of an alliance”…

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Global media, national character

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Therefore, it is undeniable that the ways Japanese and Western media reported Obama’s first visit to Japan reflect the diplomatic relations that these countries currently maintain. Concerning European media, they covered the event a minina, as they usually do for most Japan’s political and diplomatic news stories ; after all, it is also true that they were not really concerned by the summit. Like the United States, they preferred spotlighting Obama’s visit to China : despite the fact that the American President went to Japan first, probably because the US did not want to break this historic and symbolic habit (this is a kind of path dependence), we should also keep in mind that he spent only two days in Japan and three in China, as there is nowadays diplomatically more at stake with this country. Besides, more and more foreign media are reallocating their financial, material and human resources from Japan to China…

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Unlike Japanese media’s numerous front pages, articles, TV and radio reportages, editorials, etc, which expressed for instance critics about the new Prime Minister’s failures in showing Japan as more independent from American diplomacy and in making advances on the Futenma problem, US media directed their attention to Obama’s bow to Emperor Akihito, which was betraying, according to them, the country’s loss of power on the global stage and the weaknesses of their new administration. Therefore, even though the Tokyo summit’s deep contents have been more discussed in the archipelago, both Japanese and US media criticized their country’s diplomatic strategies…

This leads us to this eternal question : should the role of journalists be limited to clearly and exhaustively reporting facts or can they also give their opinions in order to set people straight about what occurs ?