この記事は昨日の夜に仕上げようと思ったんだけど、あまりにも眠すぎて無理だった。

１４日、税金の無駄遣い以外の何ものでもないＡＰＥＣが閉幕した。日本ではなぜかオバマが鎌倉に行って抹茶アイスクリームを食べたこと（YouTube動画）は報道されたけど、カナダの首相夫妻が御所で天皇、皇后両陛下にプライベートで晩餐に招待されたことはあまり報じられていない。


写真：Prime Minister Stephen Harper tries to put a bright face
on lacklustre Asian summits
"Winnipeg Free Press" By: Heather Scoffield,
The Canadian Press Posted: 13/11/2010 4:10 AM
Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his wife, Laureen Harper,
meet with Japanese Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko
at the Gosho, the Emperor's private palace, in Tokyo, Japan on Sunday.
カナダのハーパー首相夫妻と歓談する天皇陛下と皇后陛下（１４日午後、皇居・御所）

アジア太平洋経済協力会議（ＡＰＥＣ）首脳会議で来日したカナダのハーパー首相夫妻が、１４日、天皇、皇后両陛下に招かれ、皇居・御所で夕食を共にされたことがカナダのニュースで報道された。両陛下がプライベートで一国の首相を御所に招かれるというのは前代未聞とまでは言わないまでも、なかなか珍しいことだ。

なぜ、カナダの首相夫妻だけが両陛下に招かれたのかというと、去年の７月４日の「両陛下がオタワに御到着」というエントリーでもちょこっとお知らせしたけど、両陛下が初めてカナダを公式訪問した際、ハーパー首相に手厚くもてなされたお礼ということだ。

両陛下がカナダをご訪問された際、ケベック州のハリントン湖にあるハーパー首相の別荘に宿泊された。ハーパー夫妻が両陛下のために別荘を片付けたそうなんだけど、そのとき、たまたま一つだけ片付け忘れたものがあった。それが、ピアノで弾くビートルズの楽曲だった。ピアノがお得意の皇后陛下は、ピアノの上に置かれたそのビートルズの本をたいそう気に入られ、そのまま皇居に持ち帰ったとされる。

御所での夕食会では、ピアノと歌の話題で盛り上がったそうだが、皇后陛下がピアノでビートルズの曲を披露したかどうかはわからない。

ハーパー首相がオタワの国立芸術センター（National Arts Center）のギャラで、チェリストのヨー・ヨー・マの演奏と共にビートルズの"With a Little Help from My Friends"を弾き語りしているYouTubeがあったので興味のある方はどうぞ。思ったより、なかなか上手い（笑）。

【More・・・】

Reference:

Piano and poetry: Harpers get cozy with Japan's Emperor
BILL CURRY
Yokohama― Globe and Mail Update
Published Saturday, Nov. 13, 2010 9:59PM EST
Last updated Monday, Nov. 15, 2010 3:25AM EST

Stephen Harper once famously sang that he gets by with a little help from his friends. It turns out he has some pretty unique friends in Japan, where talk of piano and poetry were the main themes during a Sunday night dinner at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo.

When the APEC summit wrapped up, Mr. Harper and his wife Laureen headed to central Tokyo.

There they crossed a moat and passed an eight-metre-high stone wall that protects the city’s Imperial Palace.

As a gesture of thanks for the warm hospitality Canada extended in the summer of 2009, the Emperor and Empress of Japan have asked Mr. Harper to join them for a private dinner.

Such invitations are rare, as are glimpses of the closeted world inside the palace walls. Inside is 114 hectares of forests and gardens where successive Emperors have lived lives of extreme isolation.

Emperor Akihito, a soft-spoken gentleman, has a very special bond with Canada. At the age of 19 in 1953, the then prince visited Canada for his first ever trip abroad.

Always wanting to return to Canada with his wife, Emperor Akihito finally made the journey in July 2009, crossing the country over 12 days with stops in Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver and Victoria.

“I think it’s a great honour for our country,” Mr. Harper told reporters in advance of the dinner. “The Emperor has a very favourable view of our country.”

Mr. Harper noted that he and Ms. Harper invited the Emperor and Empress to stay at the Prime Minister’s cottage residence at Harrington Lake during their 2009 visit.

“It’s actually an interesting little story. We were asked to clear out a whole bunch of our belongings and by accident, I left some of my music books on our piano. And it turns out the Empress is a great player of the piano and borrowed one of my Beatles books so I’m interested to see what kind of progress she’s made on that over the last year and a half.”

The couples discussed piano during the visit and the Emperor and Empress shared some poetry with the Harpers.

It was sure to have been a fascinating and likely surreal visit for Mr. Harper, given the sheltered world of the Imperial Gardens. The lives of the imperial family are closely managed by a team of about 1,200 officials.

"Canada has special meaning for this Emperor, and perhaps for the Imperial Family, because Canada was the first country he visited overnight in his whole life,” Makato Watanabe, a close adviser to the Emperor, told the Globe and Mail in a 2009 interview.

For hundreds of years, the previous 124 Emperors all claimed divine powers. But as part of a post-Second World War constitution influenced by the United States, Akhito’s father, Hirohito, renounced his status as a living god. Now the future of the royal family depends on the support of the Japanese people.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper tries to put a bright face on lacklustre Asian summits
Winnipeg Free Press By: Heather Scoffield, The Canadian Press Posted: 13/11/2010 4:10 AM

Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his wife, Laureen Harper, meet with Japanese Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko at the Gosho, the Emperor's private palace, in Tokyo, Japan on Sunday.

YOKOHAMA, Japan - Stephen Harper tried to put a positive spin on the twin Asian summits that struggled in vain to produce a gameplan for the global economy's long-term recovery.
The APEC summit in Japan concluded Sunday with the 21 leaders vowing to continue working towards freer trade, and promising to refrain from anything that might spark a currency war.

At the earlier G20 summit in Korea, the leaders pledged to continue talking about how to ensure their currencies and trade balances don't stray too far into dangerous territory.
But neither summit came close to delivering the "bold" action Harper had called for on the eve of the meetings to keep the global economy from drifting back to the brink.

"The necessity of dealing with medium-term questions of global imbalances and exchange rates ― those do have to be tackled over time," Harper told reporters.

"They don't have to be tackled this month or next month in order to avert any kind of cataclysm."

Harper said Canada's budget won't be affected by the loss of momentum in talks to shore up the global economy― even though a strong Canadian dollar is likely to hurt exports at a time when the Canadian recovery is shaky.

"I don't see budgetary implications in terms of the spring," Harper said, adding that the economic assumptions his officials use are conservative, and have taken into account global turmoil.

Instead, he's urging the public to take a long term view of the situation and understand that leaders are moving towards freer trade, while also making plans to address destabilizing trade and investment balances.

"It's not a problem we can solve in one meeting," Harper said.

Still, the Asian whirlwind of summitry that concluded on Sunday did highlight one inescapable fact: diplomacy cannot keep up with finance.

The 21 countries of the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation group said all the right things as they wrapped up their two-day summit in Japan.

They committed to a long-term strategy to boost growth in the Pacific Rim. They promised to keep working on free trade, and on removing protectionist trade barriers that were thrown up during the recent financial crisis.

And most importantly, they fully backed the declaration made days earlier at the G20 summit in Seoul, Korea.

There, as in Yokohama, leaders said they would refrain from a currency war, and move towards allowing exchange rates to float freely.

They also pledged to look for ways to bring bloated trade and investment imbalances under control ― a promise meant to reassure the world that the U.S. and China would confront their economy-distorting practices.

"We recognize that our first priority is to ensure a durable recovery in private sector demand," APEC leaders said in their declaration.

But the leaders' words also made it clear that any changes would be slow in coming.
China said it would allow its currency to slowly appreciate ― a bit at a time, and the United States said it would reduce its deficit ― again, over time.
All the leaders pledged to restructure their economies so that the middle class would see greater prosperity and participate in the global economy.
But the leaders were again talking about reforms that often take years to have an effect.

And even as the leaders issued their communiques and made their public statements about the need to put the world on a stable growth track, signs of sovereign debt crisis were rearing their ugly head again in Europe.
Ireland is being pressured to accept a massive bailout from the European Union to stave off a debt crisis that is already impacting stocks and bonds in several other E.U. nations.

And as Washington begins a new round of quantitative easing ― a bond purchasing program that amounts to printing money ― currencies around the world have trembled, throwing into question plans for export-led recoveries.
"If you can figure out how to make a trade out of anything that came out of the G20 summit ― if your world was rocked in any way by the 'Seoul Action Plan' ― we invite you to let us know about it," says economist Carl Weinberg of High Frequency Economics in a note to clients.

"Overall, we say this summit yielded no results on anything, and it was a waste of time and money."

170億円もの血税を投じたAPECが閉幕したわけだけど、結局どんな経済効果がもたらされるというのか。時間とお金の無駄に終わっただけだろう。日本の経済が落ち込む中、いまだに閉ざされた皇室で働く人は１２００名にものぼる。皇居ばかりは必殺仕分け人にとっても禁猟区のようだ。

今日もランキングの応援宜しくお願いします。


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