Japanese diplomacy appears to be in a lull with the situation in Asia centered on the problem with North Korea. Immediately after the six-nation talks were held in the first half of September, reports from Moscow suggested that the next round of six-nation talks would take place in Beijing in early November. We are now in October, however, and there still has been no word about the schedule for the next round.
At the root of the problem is the fact that the two countries that are showing leadership in the six-nation talks, the United States and China, are not seeing eye to eye on how to proceed. The background factor here is Russia and China, which have behaved as both friends and foes ever since the communist days of the Soviet Union. On this issue, they are both interested parties with borders on North Korea.
Furthermore, among the six nations participating in the talks, the U.S., China and Russia view the Korean Peninsula from the perspective of a power game in international politics, so naturally there is a large gap between their sense of crisis and that of the three other countries (Japan plus North and South Korea).
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