With more than two weeks to go before President Bush's thrice-delayed state visit here, Japanese commentators are criticizing it as a bizarre blunder.
"Weird" and "weirder" were the two words Nihon Keizai Shimbun (Japan Economic News), the country's leading financial daily, used to describe the visit.Like most Japanese commentators, the paper fixed on two themes:
- "Weird" timing. After all the postponements, the leaders of both of the world's economic superpowers both happen now to have low approval ratings in the polls.
- A "weirder" and increasingly commercial tone. When the trip was first scheduled, Bush planned to join Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa in making Japan-U.S. global cooperation the dominant theme. Now he has added 21 chief executives of U.S. companies to his retinue and says he is coming, "to help open the giant markets there to more American exports."