But Mr Abe, who heads a Liberal Democratic Party administration, has spoken out about the need to prioritise the Japan-US alliance amid a changing regional dynamic.
"Based on our company's 45 years of experience with high-speed rail in Japan, bringing high-speed rail to the United States will translate into jobs, " said Mike Finnegan, an executive with US-Japan High Speed Rail and US-Japan Maglev.
Which brings us to the third theme from this election in Japan - unfortunately the same one that Japan has been teaching us (if we bothered to pay attention) since the 1990s.
The joint military exercises - codenamed Keen Sword - are being held to mark the 50th anniversary of the US-Japan alliance.
There's no pricing yet for either of the microphone packs and the live broadcast didn't hit on whether the mic (or karaoke app) would appear outside of Japan -- but the US will still be first in the line for the console, which is now merely two weeks away.
The meeting of the G8 countries - the US, Japan, Germany, UK, France, Italy, Canada and Russia - ends on Tuesday.
He said "the trust and the bond" in the US-Japan alliance was restored.
In Europe, it doesn't seem that the release of our platforms after the US and Japan - in the long run - affects how consumers feel.
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US-Japan ties were strained somewhat under the previous Japanese Democratic Party (DPJ) administration amid a row over the relocation of a US military base in Okinawa.
The UK remains the third biggest market for music behind the US and Japan - and the number of new albums sent to retailers in July, August and September 2003 reached an all-time high of 230 million.
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All five station partners - the US, Russia, Europe, Japan and Canada - have indicated their desire to keep flying the platform until at least 2020.
The G8 - Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the UK and US - said they "share the conviction that the time has now come to build peace and to reconstruct Iraq".
In the US, France and Japan - all wealthy, developed nations - the state of the world economy emerged as the main talking point.
Credit worthiness has declined for the so-called center economies of Japan, US and Europe, while it has steadily improved over the last five years in developing countries from Latin America to southeast Asia.
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They are also being built-in to high-definition TV sets, which are big business in Japan and the US, but slower to take off in Europe because of the lack of high-definition programming.
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Five partners are involved - the US, Russia, Japan, Canada and Europe (10 nations coordinated through the European Space Agency).
The US, South Korea and Japan - who believe North Korea is working to develop long-range missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads - want action such as the strengthening of sanctions.
The Linux-based tablet just launched in Japan and the US version will come out in the second half of 2011.
But some manufacturing company executives also argued that European industry was holding its own against both the old-world competition from the US and Japan and newer rivals from China or India.
Roddick reached the quarter-finals of the Japan Open last week - his first tournament since a disappointing second-round exit at the US Open.
Third, as has been the case with Japan in the 1990s, the US is fiscally maxed-out.
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Mr Campbell will be part of a high-level US delegation set to arrive in Japan next week for a trip that also includes South Korea.
And one of Japan's leading comic-book artists, Hiroo Nakata, draws us a special manga detailing how the generation gap might someday be healed.
As part of the strategy, the US will also deploy a radar-tracking station in Japan.
Six-party talks involving the US, China, Russia, Japan and the two Koreas aimed at ending North Korea's nuclear programme have been stalled since April 2009.
Japan's Honda has reported a jump in third-quarter profits as US sales recover, but cut its annual forecast as sales in China and Europe drop.
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While manned exploration had until now seen a 52-year hiatus, scientists have used two robotic unmanned vehicles to explore the Mariana Trench: Japan's Kaiko made a dive there in 1995 and the US-based Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution's vessel Nereus explored the deep in 2008.
The Shenzhen-based firm says it plans to expand into the US, Japan and India next year, and then other parts of the world in 2013.
On 7 January, a fire started in a lithium-ion battery pack of a Japan Airlines 787 in Boston, prompting the US regulator to step in and ground the 787s.
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