Obama gets it right
November 19th 2009 02:09
When US President Barack Obama met Japanese Emperor Akihito in Tokyo last week, he both shook hands and bowed.
It was a deep bow in the Japanese style, and immediately had wags calling it “stoop-id” and others questioning such an obsequious gesture by a US president to anyone, let alone the son of Japanese war-time Emperor Hirohito.
It was an opportunity for newspaper headline writers and anyone with a political agenda against President Obama.
It is a regrettable, and boring, fact of political life that anything you do will have its critics. To hold your handkerchief in one hand while blowing your nose is to instantly insult, wound and disenfranchise the majority of honest citizens who use two hands. Or so someone will claim.
Obama’s bow to the 65-year-old Emperor was a gracious, graceful and dignified gesture. It was as appropriate as it was civilised.
It is telling that it went almost unnoticed in Japan, where the bow is as ubiquitous as the handshake in the US. Indeed, the Japanese would only have had cause for comment if Obama had not bowed, or not bowed deeply enough.
In a way, it was an unremarkable thing that the President did, no more or less than most thinking people would have expected. But it didn’t stop negative knee-jerks from self-serving knockers who wouldn’t recognize a gracious act if it bit them on the nose.
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