By William Choong*
When I was a news hack in 2012, I had the good fortune of interviewing Fumio Kishida, Japan’s foreign minister. He was only 16 days into his new post, and he was doing a four-nation swing of Asia.
While he initially sounded tentative, he started to grow more comfortable as he spoke about the United States–Japan alliance and Japan’s relations with ASEAN. Kishida was then asked about the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands spat between Japan and China. He replied that Japan’s issue with China related to the “territorial dispute of (the Senkakus).”
