Ishiba goes global

What Ishiba and his colleagues did on their Golden Week holidays

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Japan’s Golden Week holidays are always an important time for Japan’s political leaders to conduct personal diplomacy, but perhaps never as important as now. The travel itineraries of Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru, major cabinet ministers, and senior Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) party officials point to his government’s increasingly energetic efforts to bolster Japan’s international partnerships to bolster the global trading system and manage the uncertainty generated by the Trump administration’s America First foreign policies. Understandably, the Ishiba government has been more focused on the first two pillars of a three-pillared strategy for managing the “national crisis” – namely direct talks with the United States and policies to offset the domestic impact of US tariffs – but Golden Week diplomacy has provided a clearer picture of the administration’s efforts to protect the global trading system.