He projected a sense of a strong personality, of a guy who you could look at and see he's a leader more in an American sense.

In general, these are not people who have much background on Japan and do not necessarily share the view that we need to work very hard at keeping the symbols of close relationship at quite a high level.

There was a repeated pattern of not admitting the true extent of what problems were, and only then discovering after the fact that they were a lot bigger than had been announced,

They are getting really tired of the one note that came out of the Bush administration for so many years, especially on counterterrorism,

They think there is a lot more going on in the region than that.

So there's a different group of people managing the Japan relationship.