Spare a thought for the puzzle that will meet foreign delegations to the Group of Eight Summit in Hokkaido on July 7. On the one hand they will find a nation that organizes itself with clockwork perfection. Indeed, the summit organization will almost certainly be over-perfection, with every detail scripted and rehearsed to extremes.
But when it comes to foreign or economic policy, expect confusion and contradiction, also to extremes.
Take the foreign policy issue that dominates most Japanese minds: Tokyo's now frustrated hopes that Pyongyang would remain on U.S. terrorist nation lists until it returned a dozen or so Japanese citizens said to have been abducted two or more decades ago.