"Year, by year, Japan's influence will erode, and the centrality of the US-Japan relationship to Pacific affairs will diminish along with it."
In Asia, China's rise is increasingly eclipsing Japan.
China's 7.3 percent growth rate last year contrasted markedly with Japan's slide into its third recession in a decade. China is sucking up the jobs and capital Japan once took for granted. Even individual investors from Tokyo to Hiroshima are shunning Japanese stocks and buying Chinese shares.
If Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi understands how much clout Japan is losing on the global stage, he's not admitting it.
In recent weeks, his government has even taken steps to damage Japan's status as Asia's financial-market hub. It's turned to banning short selling of Japanese stocks, and mostly penalizing foreign brokers for engaging in the practice.
The strategy is part of the "invisible hand" dynamic that seems to drive up share prices this time of year as Japan approaches the end of its fiscal year on March 31. The pattern is just one indication that five years after its so-called "Big Bang" financial reforms, Japan hasn't conformed to the kinds of capitalism exercised in other industrialized nations.
Here in Manila, Japan's woes aren't getting as much attention as you'd expect. Even the drop in the yen in recent months -- and the expectation for more precipitous declines this year -- isn't raising too many eyebrows.
"The Japanese yen is not the risk," Camacho explains.
"What the weak yen does to the Chinese currency is the risk because I think that's a competing currency for us, the yen is not."
It's not clear that Tokyo is succeeding in shoring up its influence in Asia -- or the global economy, for that matter.
Koizumi has scrambled of late to strengthen economic and trade ties with neighboring countries. But it's mostly been an effort to counter China's recent economic-cooperation agreements with members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
Nothing will restore Japan's status as the economic anchor of Asia like a strong recovery. Each year that goes by without one will see Japan's influence wane -- not only here in Southeast Asia, but everywhere.
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