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There’s a Creeping Sense Last Week’s Japan’s Africa Summit Was Kind of Underwhelming

by Eric Olander
Japan's Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi attends a press conference after the closing session of the eighth Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD) in Tunisia's capital Tunis on August 28, 2022. FETHI BELAID / AFP

The post-mortems of last week’s Tokyo International Conference on African Development are starting to come in and the reviews, at least from some in the Japanese media, are not very encouraging. 

One of Japan’s main news agencies, Jiji, said the event “lacked momentum” on account of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s absence due to COVID. That may seem like a rather mild critique but by Japanese standards, it’s quite significant.

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