Katsunobu Kato, its deputy chief cabinet secretary, acknowledged the women's "immeasurable pain and suffering" but said the issue "should not be made into a political or diplomatic subject".Japan's prime minister, Shinzo Abe, knows that it already is, of course.
This was something the South Koreans felt gratified to hear, but it also prompted Japan's deputy chief cabinet secretary to declare that the issue is not a "diplomatic subject".There was another rocky moment with Japan.
Few citizens' legal petitions for government information are heeded, and few diplomatic subjects are more sensitive to the Chinese government than its aid to North Korea.
As for Sethi, he is, not surprisingly, less diplomatic on the subject; he considers industrywide codes a kind of institutionalization of the lowest common denominator — there's no reason, he says, why companies shouldn't compete in the field of ethics as they do in everything else.
At that time, talk of a possible unilateral Israeli air strike on Iran was a dominant subject of diplomatic conversation.
Whether and how the program should continue has been the subject of diplomatic tussling between the United States and its European allies.
The Commission on International Religious Freedom, a federal agency, indefinitely postponed a visit to China that had been the subject of diplomatic negotiations for six months.
Prior to rapprochement with the Nixon administration in 1972, and during Mao's lengthy enmity with the Soviet Union, China was subject to diplomatic purdah.
Even minuscule changes in the wording of diplomatic statements on the subject are often viewed as transformative on both sides of the Taiwan Strait.
Turkey did not act alone, but with financial support from Qatar and Saudi Arabia and after consultation with the United States, said these officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the subject's diplomatic delicacy.
Nor was there much more security along the bombed natural gas pipeline, although the disruption in delivery to Israel has become a subject of diplomatic and legal wrangling between Israel and Egypt.
