Japan talks trade at ASEAN summit
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Thailand's Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, left, and his Japanese counterpart Junichiro Koizumi
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TOKYO, Japan (AP) -- Japan is pushing hard to strengthen trade and security ties with Southeast Asian countries as leaders from around the region gather in Tokyo for a two-day summit.
Just before the meeting opened Thursday, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi agreed with the leaders of Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines to open free trade agreement negotiations early next year.
Japan was also expected to sign a regional security pact with the 10-country Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
The summit, proposed by Koizumi after a Southeast Asian tour last year, marks the first time the ASEAN leaders have met outside of their region.
It is being seen by Japan -- which is not an ASEAN member -- as an opportunity to bolster its political and economic standing in the region amid an increasing challenge from China.
Koizumi was expected to sign ASEAN's non-aggression pact -- the 27-year-old Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in Southeast Asia -- by which countries pledge respect for each other's independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity.
He was also scheduled to meet with the leader of Myanmar's military regime and discuss Japan's concerns over the junta's treatment of pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
Japan had been Myanmar's largest aid donor, but its relations with Myanmar soured at an ASEAN summit in Bali in October, when Koizumi confronted Prime Minister Khin Nyunt on the detention of Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
Japan suspended economic assistance in June after the military government detained Suu Kyi following a clash between her supporters and a pro-junta mob on May 30. In September she was transferred to house arrest at her lakeside villa in the capital, Yangon.
Japan is ASEAN's second-largest trading partner and investor, after the United States. The bloc's trade with Japan was worth an estimated 13.4 trillion yen (US$122.9 billion) in 2002. Japan supplied 60 percent of the region's overseas aid in 2001.
Despite the agreements Thursday to begin trade-opening negotiations, Japan has lagged behind in reaching such pacts, and difficulties were expected in the months ahead.
Japan's only trade liberalization pact to date has been with Singapore, a small Southeast Asian city-state that exports few of the agricultural goods that threaten Japan's politically powerful farmers.
Exploratory negotiations with Thailand -- Japan's eighth-largest export market -- ran into trouble over concerns that a surge in shipments of cheap Thai rice would overwhelm Japan's domestic producers.
Still, Koizumi has voiced hope that liberalizing trade would spur economic growth and boost reform at home.
In a joint statement issued Thursday with Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, Koizumi cited the additional pressures free trade would create for reform as one motive for negotiating an agreement.
ASEAN members are Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, Myanmar, Malaysia and Thailand.
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