What’s with Japan’s sudden interest in Africa?
Last week Masahiko Komura announced that 30 billion yen would be given to African nations for refugee relief, food assistance and in support of UN operations in the region. And in today’s news we hear that Fukuda has invited Kenyan, Wangari Maathai, the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, to the Tokyo International Conference on African Development later this year. In addition, he is going to make a personal plea to Matt Damon, Bill Gates and Bono at an international conference in Switzerland this month for them to attend. And he’s also scouting out Angelina Jolie (understandable) for her to be present at this Tokyo conference.
So what has caused this interest in Africa all of a sudden? Fukuda seems to be going all out on this and it begs the question, “Why?”. It’s possible that the government is trying to make Fukuda look like an established statesman. Hopefully they are not trying to go down the cringeworthy route of “Cool Brittania”, which the British government adopted just after Blair came to power. If these figures attended though, surely an equal number of [i]tarento[/i] would be needed (as seems to be the case whenever a foreign celebrity makes an appearance in Japan.
My thoughts are that some sort of trade or economic agreement will be made between Japan and African nations somewhere in the next 6-12 months as that would seem to be the most logical explanation.
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