By Minu Jain
Tokyo, Oct 25 (IANS) Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's interview to the Japanese media ahead of his three-day visit to the country was extensively covered in the newspapers here Monday, meriting an anchor in The Daily Yomiuri and a front page mention in the International Herald Tribue/Asahi Shimbun edition.
The Japan Times carried a small report on page 2 on the arrival of the prime minister in the Japanese capital Sunday evening. The story headlined "Indian leader Singh arrives for trade, nuke talks" said he was in Tokyo for an "official working visit" to ink a free-trade agreement and discuss with Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan a bilateral civil nuclear cooperation pact.
While the International Herald Tribune/Asahi Shimbun mentioned the interview on the front page and carried the report on the back page, The Daily Yomiuri anchor used a New Delhi datelined story as its anchor with a photograph of the prime minister.
The daily also had a full inside page titled "Indian Prime Minister's Visit" with several ads from Indian establishments here - the State Bank of India, the Samrat chain of restaurants, the Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry Japan (ICCJ) and the HMI Hotel group.
A column by Samrat restaurant owner and another stating that the ICCJ and the Indian Merchants Association of Yokohama accompanied the ads, as did photographs of Commonwealth Games mascot Shera, the new Terminal 3 of the Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi and the Delhi Metro.
The Japan Times also carried similar pages.
Japanese prime minister Kan's statement that the country was facing growing security challenges amid the rise in China's naval activity and North Korea's missile development programme was clearly a major worry. It was the lead in both The Daily Yomiuri and The Japan Times.
That China was a concern both in India and Japan was reflected by the fact that of the five stories on the front page in The Daily Yomiuri, three were on China.
The Japan Times front page devoted two stories to China while also highlighting the results of the Hokkaido by-election and the disclosures by WikiLeaks.