Japan is a friend closer than a brother.' That's how former president Rodrigo Duterte welcomed his then Japanese counterpart, the late Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, to Manila in early 2017. Throughout his six-year term in office, and decades-long stint as a provincial official, Duterte maintained extremely cordial ties with Japan, which has had a century-old diplomatic and commercial presence in his hometown of Davao. In many ways, his warm embrace of Japan made sense, since, as Duterte put it during a late-2016 visit to Tokyo: 'Japan has really been our biggest helper.

https://opinion.inquirer.net/163985/true-independence-beyond-china-and-the-west

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