US President Barack Obama arrived in Japan yesterday evening for a G7 summit, kicking off a historic visit that will also take him to Hiroshima.
Obama planned to meet with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe last night. Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said Abe would raise the recent arrest of a former US Marine in connection with the murder of a Japanese woman on Okinawa.
Obama is to join his G7 counterparts in Ise and Shima, Mie Prefecture, for a summit before traveling to Hiroshima tomorrow, where he will become the first sitting US president to visit the city, which was destroyed in a 1945 atomic bomb attack in World War II.
Photo: Reuters
Heads of state and government from Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Canada yesterday were also making their way to Ise and Shima, which are in a mountainous area 300km southwest of Tokyo.
Earlier yesterday as he wrapped up a historic visit to Vietnam, Obama praised the nation’s next generation of leaders for being more conscious of the environment than previous ones and urged them to “do something about” climate change.
During his final public event in Ho Chi Minh City, Obama basked in the admiration of hundreds of young leaders who participated in a town hall-style event and prefaced some of their questions to him with praise about his leadership and his “inspiring speeches.”
He used a question about preserving a Vietnamese cave from development to pivot to climate change, saying that Vietnam would be one of the countries most affected by the trend of warming temperatures and rising seas.
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