US Vice President Kamala Harris met with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida shortly after arriving in Tokyo for the state funeral of assassinated former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe.
Abe, who was assassinated in July, was honored yesterday and Harris was leading a US delegation to pay its respects.
“The alliance between Japan and the United States is a cornerstone of what we believe is integral to peace, stability and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific region,” Harris said on Monday at the Akasaka Palace.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Kishida said Abe “poured his heart and soul” into strengthening ties between the two nations.
“I feel it is my duty to carry on his aspirations,” Kishida said.
Abe forged closer ties with the US at a time of increased concern about China’s ambitions and Kishida is continuing his push for a stronger national defense.
The potential for a war over Taiwan has troubled Japan, which would likely be pulled into such a conflict.
US President Joe Biden has said that the US would send its own troops to defend Taiwan if China attacked.
“The president has addressed that issue and if it comes up, the vice president will align with the president,” said a senior administration official, who requested anonymity to discuss a private meeting.
The official also said Harris would “make clear our ironclad commitment to Japan’s security.”
More than 50,000 US troops are based in Japan.
Harris plans to visit Seoul tomorrow and South Korean Prime Minister Han Duck-soo during a meeting early yesterday said that Harris would visit the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), the border area with North Korea that is jointly controlled by the US-led UN Command and North Korea.
A White House official, speaking on the condition on anonymity, confirmed that Harris would tour sites at the DMZ and visit troops there to demonstrate that the US commitment to South Korea’s defense is “ironclad.”
Her visit, the first by a ranking US official since House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited the DMZ in August, would come in the same week that North Korea test-fired a short-range ballistic missile in apparent response to joint military exercises between the US and South Korea.
Harris would be the highest-level US official to visit the DMZ since former US president Donald Trump visited in 2019 for a meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.
Harris, who is scheduled to spend three nights in Tokyo, is visiting Japan at a politically fraught moment. Kishida’s decision to hold a state funeral for Abe, a conservative nationalist, has been controversial in a nation where such memorials are uncommon and some oppose honoring him in this way.
Kishida is also pushing for a dramatic expansion of defense spending that would give Japan the world’s third-largest military budget in the coming years, after the US and China. A new national security strategy, the first in almost a decade, is in the works as well.
The debate is playing out as Japan re-evaluates the risk of war after the shock of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, said Christopher Johnstone, senior adviser and Japan chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
The fighting in Europe is a reminder that “conflict really is possible and Japan lives in a pretty difficult neighborhood,” he said.
Japan is upgrading its missiles and considering using them for pre-emptive strikes — a move critics say would fundamentally change the nation’s defense policy and breach the post-war pacifist constitution that limits use of force to self-defense.
KINGPIN: Marset allegedly laundered the proceeds of his drug enterprise by purchasing and sponsoring professional soccer teams and even put himself in the starting lineups Notorious Latin American narco trafficker Sebastian Marset, who eluded police for years, was handed over to US authorities after his arrest on Friday in Bolivia. Marset, a Uruguayan national who was on the US most-wanted list, was passed to agents of the US Drug Enforcement Administration at Santa Cruz airport in Bolivia, then put on a US airplane, Bolivian state television showed. “The arrest and deportation were carried out pursuant to a court order issued by the US justice system,” Bolivian Minister of Government Marco Antonio Oviedo told reporters. The alleged kingpin was arrested in an upscale neighborhood of Santa
ACTIONABLE ADVICE: The majority of chatbots tested provided guidance on weapons, tactics and target selections, with Perplexity and Meta AI deemed to be the least safe From school shootings to synagogue bombings, leading artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots helped researchers plot violent attacks, according to a study published on Wednesday that highlighted the technology’s potential for real-world harm. Researchers from the nonprofit watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate and CNN posed as 13-year-old boys in the US and Ireland to test 10 chatbots, including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Deepseek and Meta AI. Eight of the chatbots assisted the make-believe attackers in more than half the responses, providing advice on “locations to target” and “weapons to use” in an attack, the study said. The chatbots had become a “powerful accelerant for
SCANDAL: Other images discovered earlier show Andrew bent over a female and lying across the laps of a number of women, while Mandelson is pictured in his underpants A photograph of former British prince Andrew and veteran politician Peter Mandelson sitting in bathrobes alongside late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was unearthed on Friday in previously published documents. The image is believed to be the first known photograph of the two men with Epstein. They are currently engulfed in scandal in the UK over their ties to their mutual friend. The undated photograph, first reported by ITV News, shows King Charles III’s disgraced brother and former British ambassador to the US sitting barefoot outside on a wooden deck. They appear to have mugs with a US flag on them
Since the war in the Middle East began nearly two weeks ago, the telephone at Ron Hubbard’s bomb shelter company in Texas has not stopped ringing. Foreign and US clients are rushing to buy his bunkers, seeking refuge in case of air raids, nuclear fallout or apocalypse. With the US and Israel pounding Iran, and Tehran retaliating with strikes across the region, Hubbard has seen demand for his product soar, mostly from Gulf nation customers in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. “You can imagine how many people are thinking: ‘I wish I had a bomb shelter,’” Hubbard, 63, said in
RSS