Japan fans out

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Japan’s political leadership took advantage of the holiday week to fan out across the globe and meet allies.

China was the biggest omission.

Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi used her second overseas trip since taking office to head south, meeting Vietnam’s new leader and bolstering ties with Australia.

Defense Minister Shinjirō Koizumi is in the Philippines to inspect Japanese troops exercising there for the first time since World War II. Another nine ministers visited Malaysia, India, Bangladesh and nations in Africa and elsewhere.

The absence of a China leg underscores how bad Tokyo’s ties to Beijing are right now, with the visit of a delegation of ruling party lawmakers to Taiwan likely to only add to strains.

Relations have been tense since Takaichi said that Japan’s military could be deployed in the event of a war in the Taiwan Strait.

Six months on, there’s no sign that either side is ready to back down.

A senior LDP lawmaker did visit China for a day, Japanese media reported, but only stopped in at some factories without meeting any officials.

Finance Minister Satsuki Katayama was meanwhile in the ancient Uzbek city of Samarkand at a gathering of the Asian Development Bank, in which Japan and the US are the top shareholders.

There she held a flurry of meetings with Asian counterparts, winning praise for her performance and for Japan’s new energy supply-chain initiative.

Here, though, she met with a relatively low-level Chinese counterpart, signaling Beijing’s scorn for a Japan-dominated meeting.

Takaichi’s trip to Australia showcased the two nations’ “quasi-alliance” — effectively the best partner each has after the US.

In Canberra, she felt comfortable enough to talk about her hobby: heavy metal. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is a fellow rock fan, and Takaichi gifted him a record cabinet.

Among the vinyl was an album titled The World’s on Fire. — Erica Yokoyama and James Mayger

Photographer: Hilary Wardhaugh/Bloomberg

Global Must Reads

Hundreds of vessels were seen clustering near Dubai today as more ships moved away from a still-empty Strait of Hormuz in response to Iran’s efforts to widen its area of control in the waterway. The US and Iran exchanged fire in a flareup of violence that also drew in the United Arab Emirates yesterday, prompting calls for renewed strikes on Iranian targets and casting doubt on the fate of a four-week ceasefire.

Photographer: Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty Images

US President Donald Trump said he’s looking forward to meeting Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping, signaling his plans for the high-stakes summit are still on despite fresh tensions between the world’s largest economies. The two leaders are slated to meet on May 14-15 in Beijing as they seek to navigate challenges on trade, Taiwan and the war in Iran, with the US leader saying he will raise the case of Hong Kong’s imprisoned former media tycoon Jimmy Lai.

Romanian lawmakers will vote on ousting Prime Minister Ilie Bolojan in a move that could plunge the country into a renewed political crisis and imperil efforts to narrow the widest budget deficit in the European Union. A no-confidence motion today is backed by the legislature’s two biggest parties — the main far-right opposition and the Social Democrats, which quit the ruling coalition last month over unpopular fiscal cuts.

Ukrainian drones now regularly hit targets more than 1,000 miles inside Russia, reaching to the Ural Mountains and communities where most people had seen the war as a distant problem. Russia and Ukraine announced distinct ceasefires on different days this week, with Moscow warning Kyiv not to violate its unilateral plans to stand down temporarily on Saturday when it marks the World War II defeat of Nazi Germany.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu-dominant Bharatiya Janata Party expanded its support base beyond traditional strongholds, eliminating two opposition leaders in the process and giving him momentum to push through his agenda ahead of the next general election in 2029. Opposition parties allege large-scale violations in vote counting that led to the BJP’s landslide victory in West Bengal, a region that’s among the last few bastions dominated by rivals to Modi’s organization.

Europe will consider all retaliatory options should Trump follow through on his threat to raise tariffs on cars and trucks from the EU to 25%, the bloc’s finance ministers said.

A man was shot by Secret Service officers near the White House yesterday after agents spotted him carrying a concealed firearm and he opened fire, less than two weeks after an incident at a Washington gala attended by Trump.

Taiwan’s leaders have the right to engage with the world and visit the leaders of allied countries, President Lai Ching-te said, after completing a diplomatic mission to Eswatini that was nearly thwarted by China.

Labour’s unpopularity after UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s perceived failure to deliver on election promises has revitalized the nationalists in Scotland.

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Chart of the Day

The Gulf energy shock is adding urgency to South Korea’s efforts to cut its reliance on imports for the majority of its energy needs, and helping President Lee Jae Myung to push his clean-power agenda. Electric-vehicle sales and solar-panel imports have surged since late February, while South Korea has rolled out a supplementary budget withsome $365 million for solar and wind projects, energy-storage systems and EV subsidies.

And Finally

The major oil-producing province of Canada is one step closer to a referendum on independence after leaders of a separatist group in Alberta said they’ve gathered more than enough signatures to force a vote. Longstanding disputes between the region and the federal government have coalesced into an independence movement seeking to reap the rewards of one of the world’s largest reserves of crude, as well as abundant natural gas.

Photographer: Leah Hennel/Bloomberg

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