Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore was in Japan a few weeks ago promoting "An Inconvenient Truth," the documentary film version of his traveling power-point presentation on the dangers of global warming. He made the rounds of the news shows at the time, but due to the extra time required to edit entertainment programs, his variety show appearances didn't air until this week, thus coinciding with the release of that dire report issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which stated definitively that the Earth's atmosphere is heating up and humans are responsible.

Where Gore didn't show up was in the company of government leaders. He's no longer vice president and therefore protocol doesn't require local politicians to invite him in for a chat, but when Gore gave his environmental lecture as a guest on shows like Nihon TV's "The World's Most Useful Classroom" and NHK's English-study show "Eigo de Shaberanaito," he was treated less as an activist than as a movie star plugging his film. So why didn't Shinzo Abe invite him to the prime minister's residence? He invited Will Smith.

Maybe it was the subject. Gore talks specifically about the effects of human-generated carbon dioxide on the world's climate, a danger that the Bush administration maintains is mostly theoretical. Abe's Liberal Democratic Party may not have wanted to seem as if it endorsed his cause since America is still Japan's most valuable ally.