I was finishing up this column in the middle of a symposium held in Tokyo this week. The event, titled "Democracies and Alliances in the Indo-Pacific," was co-organized by the Pacific Forum CSIS, Tama University's Center for Rule-Making Strategies and the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo. Unfortunately, I was one of the Session One speakers.
This means that I had to provide the audience with a Japanese perspective on the concept of the "Indo-Pacific" at the start of the conference. This jargon has been frequently used particularly since November 2017 when U.S. President Donald Trump referred to the "Indo-Pacific region" over and over again during his first tour to Asia.
How did the rest of the world view Trump's remarks? A BBC correspondent then reported that Indo-Pacific is something to "define America's new geopolitical view of Asia" but is only "a different way of labeling what we usually call Asia-Pacific, emphasizing the rise of India in the face of China's growing global" challenges.