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Caroline Kennedy speaks before a sake barrel breaking ceremony commemorating the opening of an exhibition in Japan. Photo: AP

Outgoing ambassador Caroline Kennedy boosted US-Japan ties

Kennedy ruffled some feathers early in her tenure, but during her time, the conservative Abe and liberal Obama found common ground

Caroline Kennedy stepped down on Wednesday after three years as US ambassador to Japan, where she was welcomed like a celebrity and worked to deepen the US-Japan relationship despite regular flare-ups over American military bases on the southern island of Okinawa.

Appointed by President Barack Obama in 2013, she had been expected to leave with the coming change in US leadership. President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team has also said that all envoys who were political appointees must step down by Inauguration Day on Friday. Trump has not named a new ambassador yet.

She was true to the Obama administration goals, and she maintained the Kennedy mystique without making it the focal point of her tenure
Nancy Snow, Kyoto University of Foreign Studies

Kennedy ruffled some feathers early in her tenure by tweeting her opposition to Japan’s dolphin hunt, shortly after her embassy issued a statement expressing “disappointment” that Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe had visited a shrine that memorialises second world war criminals, among others.

During her time, though, the conservative Abe and liberal Obama found common ground despite coming from opposite ends of the political spectrum.

“She has great skills and authority as a convener, a much needed function in US-Japan relations,” said Kent Calder, the director of the Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington. “She has been more of a network builder than a concrete policy initiator, but that is almost an inevitable role for ambassadors these days.”

Caroline Kennedy, tries a local specialty, sweet rice cakes she made with students at a high school in Sendai. Photo: AP

He said her legacy includes facilitating Obama’s historic visit to Hiroshima last May, one of two Japanese cities devastated by US atomic bombs in 1945. Kennedy was in Pearl Harbour at the end of last year when Abe reciprocated with a visit to the site of Japan’s 1941 surprise attack that drew America into the second world war.

Some will also remember the efforts of the first female US ambassador to Japan to promote literacy and women’s and LGBT rights, and for her visits to the northeast region slowly recovering from a deadly and destructive tsunami in 2011.

Japan;s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe listening to US Ambassador to Japan Caroline Kennedy. Photo: AFP

“She was true to the Obama administration goals, and she maintained the Kennedy mystique without making it the focal point of her tenure,” said Nancy Snow, a professor of public diplomacy at Kyoto University of Foreign Studies. “I will remember her as a champion of person-to-person exchange and engagement.”

Winning understanding in Okinawa for a reduced but still large US military presence proved an impossible task, and was hampered by a series of incidents from crimes by US base personnel to crashes of US military aircraft.

“In every ambassadorship, there are both enduring issues and unpredictable events,” she told Japan’s largest newspaper, the Yomiuri, in a farewell interview. “In my case, both were linked to Okinawa.”

Caroline Kennedy, right, and Akie Abe, wife of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, wearing Monpe, or work pants for women, prepare for rice planting, in Shimonoseki, western Japan. Photo: AP

The daughter of former US President John F. Kennedy arrived in November 2013 to more fanfare than the typical envoy. Thousands of onlookers lined streets to snap pictures and wave as she travelled by horse-drawn carriage to present her credentials to Japan’s emperor. The procession was broadcast live on Japan’s public broadcaster NHK.

Her popularity strained embassy resources, a 2015 US government report found, because of the demands for her participation in events across the country. It noted that the embassy “has now caught up on the backlog of gifts sent to the ambassador in her first six months in Japan”.

Now 59, Kennedy is returning to her Manhattan home with husband Edwin Schlossberg, who split his time between Tokyo and New York. She hasn’t indicated publicly what her future plans are.

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