Yoshihiko Noda and Barack Obama at the U.N.
President Barack Obama met with Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly this week.
This was Noda’s first meeting with Obama since his ascendancy to the office of prime minister earlier this month. He is the sixth prime minister in five years.
The two leaders predictably discussed the relocation of the Futenma Air Station, aid for the March 11 quake and tsunami, and the economy.
The two countries agreed in 2006 to relocate the Futenma Air Station within the island of Okinawa to ease the burden on the local residents. Former Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama resigned after he failed to deliver on a campaign promise to relocate the air station. According to a WikiLeaks document, Obama expressed his disappointment to Hatoyama for the failure. The relocation has been pushed back to 2014.
On the economy, Obama said: “As the two largest economies in the world, we have to continue to promote growth that can help put our people to work and improve standards of living. We have to modernize our alliance to meet the needs of the 21st century.”
The Japanese economy has been caught in stagflation for over 20 years now while racking up world-record public debt, becoming a construction/public works-based welfare state.
