WATCH LIVE: Biden and Japan PM Yoshihide Suga Hold Joint News Conference in Washington, D.C.

(Apr. 16) Watch live as President Joe Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga hold a joint news conference at the White House on Friday, April 16, 2021, in Washington, DC.

Biden began meeting Friday afternoon with Suga to discuss issues including human rights, Taiwan and supply-chain resilience.

China is expected to loom large in the talks, Biden’s first in-person meeting at the White House with a foreign leader since taking office.

“The United States and Japan have a big agenda ahead of us,” Biden said as reporters were briefly allowed in the room. “Our cooperation is vital, in my view, and I think in both our views, to meeting the challenges facing our nation, and ensuring the future of the region will remain free and open and prosperous.”

Suga said he wanted to “reaffirm the new and tight bond between us and in order to realize a free and open Indo-Pacific. There are many common challenges as well as emerging global issues including Covid-19 and climate change.”

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[alfrede]

Have you checked the price of gasoline at the pump recently? In New Jersey where I live gasoline prices have risen $1.00 to over $3.00 per gallon. They will rise further in the coming summer months. So will food costs and other products. And wait ‘till you see the new taxes we will be faced with thanks to the Biden Executive Orders.

[chiwawa]

"He brings kindness back to the whitehouse." - Every NPC ever

[Kimjongun]

Its goal is to deny the current post-war system represented by the Peace Constitution and restore the Japanese system and ideas before and during the war. To this end, the constitutional amendment, revisionist history education, and preservation and revival of legislation during the imperial period are being promoted, and much of them have already been realized. Tracking down all the right-wing activities and controversies in Japan, there is always this organization at its peak. If the center point of the right wing of the Japanese religious community is the Shinsa headquarters, there is this Japanese conference in the political-social world.

As the most financially and politically influential organizations among the major right-wing groups in Japan were created in cooperation, they have a strong influence on Japanese society and have numerous front organizations in the lower part, so their scale is very vast. Close ties with Japan's Abe administration and the LDP are suspected. Foreign media often evaluate this organization as a highly conservative nationalist lobby.

It is a private organization founded on May 30, 1997 by integrating two organizations: the National Assembly to Protect Japan and the Society to Protect Japan. As of August 2017, the chairman was Takubo Datae. As of 2017, the number of members was about 40, 000, and it has its headquarters in all 47 prefectures in Japan and branches in 241 municipalities. Brazil also has an overseas branch.

About 270 of the Japanese lawmakers are said to be members of the Japanese Parliament. This is 40% of the number of the Japanese House of Representatives. In addition, it formed a meeting of members of the National Assembly of Japan under the National Assembly Federation and currently includes the Constitutional Democratic Party, the National Democratic Party, and the Japanese Restoration Party, and more than 95 percent are the Liberal Democratic Party. In addition, local councilors and businessmen's associations were formed, and there is also a think tank called the Japan Policy Research Center.

As of the 4th Abe Cabinet, including former Prime Minister Shinjo Abe, the founding member of the Japanese Conference, 15 out of a total of 20 ministers were members of the Japanese Conference.  Taro Aso, who often speaks far-right, is a member of the Japanese Parliament, and Fumio Kishida, chairman of the Liberal Democratic Party, and Yuriko Koike, governor of Tokyo. Hideaki Kase, Japan's representative right-wing officer and son of Toshikazu Kase described above, also served as a representative member of the organization. Even Shigeru Ishiba, known as a relative moderate in the LDP in Korea, belongs to the Japanese Conference, and there are surprisingly quite a few members of the LDP, other than Ishiba.

As it is a large-scale organization with 40, 000 official members alone, it wields huge funds. It is said that simple annual membership income alone earns about 400 million yen a year, and donations and sponsorships from partner organizations are also considerable. In the mid-1970s, before the Japanese Conference was launched in earnest, the Meiji Shrine was so powerful that it sprayed hundreds of millions of won without any conditions to succeed in the Wonho legislation movement.

[jamesrlewin]

Grand Poo-Bah Biden seems comfortable in his assigned lacky role.

[theleatherface]

The revival Olympics can never be done. If you look at the current situation in Japan, it's very dangerous. Someday there will be a big earthquake, a lot of deaths from the entire radioactive infection, and a serious volcanic eruption. Now the Japanese government is not fixing it at all. I'm in last place in terms of the situation in Japan.