Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga is likely to meet U.S. President Joe Biden on April 9, the first foreign leader to meet the President in the White House, Japan’s Yomiuri newspaper reported on March 14.
The two are expected to agree to strengthen the bilateral alliance and their commitment to the freedom of passage in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, the Yomiuri reported without citing sources.
Calls to the Prime Minister’s office were not answered. Chief Cabinet Secretary Katsunobu Kato said on March 12 that Mr. Suga will make the visit in the first half of April.
Mr. Suga’s predecessor, Shinzo Abe, was the first foreign leader to meet Mr. Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, soon after he was elected President in 2016.
Mr. Biden and Mr. Suga joined the leaders of India and Australia in a virtual summit on March 12, vowing the Quad nations would supply up to a billion doses of coronavirus vaccine across Asia by the end of 2022, a message choreographed to counter China’s growing influence.
A meeting between U.S. and Japanese foreign and defenceministers scheduled for Tuesday in Tokyo will directly criticiseChina for what Washington and Tokyo call its attempts to alterthe status quo in the East and South China Seas, the newspapersaid.
China has established military outposts on artificialislands it has built in the South China Sea and Washington hasrejected Beijing’s disputed claims to offshore resources in mostof the sea as “completely unlawful.”
(Reporting by Stanley White; Editing by William Mallard)
