TOKYO – Considered something of a lightweight on foreign policy issues, Japan’s new prime minister has spent much of his career in the shadows, supporting previous leader Shinzo Abe with backroom bureaucratic maneuvers and in largely scripted, sometimes prickly dealings with the media.
That will change Saturday morning (Friday afternoon at the United Nations) when Yoshihide Suga makes his very public debut, albeit virtually and in a prerecorded video, at the U.N.
General Assembly, the world’s premier international gathering of leaders. Don’t expect the earth to shake, though, with resounding rhetoric or wildly innovative ideas to improve Japan's rocky ties with the nations it terrorized in WWII or its decades-long economic malaise.