It was this broad avenue, hung with bobbing white lanterns, alight with girls fluent in yukata (a light kimono) and little boys carrying lit-up white globes, that greeted me my first night in Kyoto, in 1984, on a three-day visit through Japan with my mother, en route to India.

BBC: The walk that made me love Japan

The following day Mukhamed Tsikhanov, the deputy economy minister responsible for Kyoto, seemed to flatly contradict Mr Illarionov.

ECONOMIST: Climate change

Coincidentally, this meeting starts on the day that US President George Bush has chosen to reveal his alternative to the Kyoto Protocol, which most of the other industrialised countries want to adopt to constrain humanity's influence on the climate.

BBC: Boston Park,