This weekend, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz will be in Tokyo for bilateral talks with the Japanese government. The two nations are aware of their mutual economic and strategic objectives. Nina Haase from DW is in Tokyo.
Early afternoon on Saturday at Tokyo Haneda Airport. Rain is pelting down in torrents. German cabinet members are greeted on the red carpet by officials holding wet umbrellas decorated with the colors of the German flag after a nonstop 12-and-a-half-hour journey in Germany’s brand-new “Konrad Adenauer” government aircraft.
The presence of the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s highest-ranking delegation is demonstrated by the appearance of Robert Habeck, Boris Pistorius, Volker Wissing, Christian Lindner, Nancy Faeser, and Annalena Baerbock, who are the ministers of economy and climate, defense, transport, finance, interior, and foreign policy, respectively.
That is not an accident. It is an intentional show of reverence for Japan, which is playing a bigger role in German government policy. It wasn’t always like that. In the past, when German administrations mentioned Asia, they usually meant China.
Particularly since Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, that has drastically altered. Japan, a nation that behaved differently in 2014 after the invasion of Crimea, immediately condemned the war and accepted western sanctions against Russia.
The ministers are led to their vehicles, and the German motorcade rushes through Tokyo’s city center in the downpour once more, one might say.
