LONDON — The Japanese government spent huge amounts of money in an attempt to ensure that the Okinawa summit and related events in Fukuoka and Miyazaki was a success, but was the money well spent and did the summit increase Japan's prestige in the world? The answer to both questions that I as a generally sympathetic foreign observer have to give must be "no."
Some foreign observers thought that the Japanese government's expenditure was counterproductive. Too much was too obviously spent on show rather than substance. Some more puritanically minded world leaders would have preferred the money to have been expended on reducing the debt of the world's poorest nations. Even the most friendly observers seem to have thought that the expenditure was at best unnecessary.
The general assumption abroad was that the main reason why the Japanese government decided to spend so much money on the Okinawan summit was to appease anti-Japanese sentiment in Okinawa, i.e., for internal political reasons, not international ones. If this was the case, it is at least debatable whether it was successful. Okinawan voters are not fools, and I suspect they saw through this ploy. Many Japanese must also have had doubts about the way some of their money was spent, e.g., in propping up a potentially bankrupt resort in Miyazaki.