THE official visit to the Philippines of Japan’s Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko has been most successful, strengthening relations between the Philippines and Japan in all fields, from the cultural to the economic. From all indications, the imperial couple found their visit fruitful and enjoyable.
Our Philippine government, we note with pride, under the leadership of President Aquino, left no stone unturned to ensure the success of the visit. All departments made a contribution to the realization of the goal of deepening and broadening the relations between the two countries.
At a banquet in Malacañang held in their honor, the emperor reminisced about an earlier visit to the Philippines by the newly married imperial couple. In a mark of cordiality, the emperor was reported to have said that in that visit, the imperial couple failed to see Tagaytay Lake because it was engulfed in fog; whereupon the President offered to take the imperial couple to the lake, but the emperor declined because of the tightness of their schedule. The emperor set the tone of the visit when the imperial couple paid respects to a war memorial in Laguna. There, the emperor expressed remorse over the loss of many Filipino lives in World War II and articulated the hope that countries live together in peace and harmony.
Japan is the Philippines’s biggest trading partner, the most generous source of official development assistance, and the creative genius that formulated the Plan for the Expansion and Modernization of the Transportation Network for the Greater Metro Manila Area, elements of which the Philippine government has been bidding out to contractors for completion up to year 2030. Lately Japan has been extending support to our Armed Forces of the Philippines Modernization Program by donating to us military equipment.
Japan used to be the country with the highest per-capita income in the world, exceeding even the United States—until about the 1990s when it began running into difficulties that included pressures toward deflation and stagnation. A succession of corrective measures in the decades of the 1990s and 2000s failed to reverse the downward trend.
All that is about to end. By most accounts, the current revitalization program is lifting the economy out of the doldrums and restoring it to the path of high growth. The program has been deliberately weakening the yen, extending financial support to corporations, embarking on a quantitative-easing program, trying to raise wages and incomes, all to stimulate consumption and investment demand. As shown by economic indicators, the program is succeeding and Japan can be expected to resume its role of leadership in the world economy in the coming days. The visit of the imperial couple was not aimed specifically at the strengthening of economic relations, but to the extent that its benign effects spilled into the economic arena it contributed to this strengthening.
We join the Philippine national community in wishing Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko all the best on their travel home.
Image credits: jimbo Albano