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The snowy capital of the island of Hokkaido offers a quieter alternative to Japan’s congested “Golden Route” of Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto.

In its broader scope, Japan aims to establish a “rule-based international order” with Central Asia, focusing on priority areas of cooperation, including environmental sustainability, human resource development, and technology. However, beyond these headline outcomes, two substantive areas deserve closer analytical attention.

Japan's economy is returning to something resembling normality for the first time in decades. That's likely to mean more volatility ahead for the yen and other Japanese assets, as investors try to make sense of this new reality.

The new pragmatism, though, demands that Japan not only swallow the absurdity that this represents restitution for treating the US unfairly under the old, US-backed order, but that Japan become actively complicit in the broader erosion of faith in international rules.