Okinawa is host to the bulk of U.S. military forces in Japan, whose alliance with Washington is central to its security.

Russia and Japan are involved in a dispute over Kuril islands, captured by the Soviet Union at World War II's end.

The leaders did not mention Trump by name, but they did little to mask what was on their minds — highlighting how Europe and Japan have been pushed closer by Trump’s actions.

On Friday, Japan notified the World Trade Organization that it was reserving the right to impose retaliatory tariffs against the United States in response to tariffs on steel and aluminum imports

Mr. Abe hoped to secure Mr. Trump’s commitment on two issues: curtailing the North’s nuclear and ballistic weapons programs, and facilitating the return of Japanese citizens abducted by North Korea in the 1970s and ’80s.

But the contradictions also reflect a more fundamental disarray in the presidency’s policy toward Asia. It seems caught between the geopolitical realism of Mr. Trump’s diplomats and the economic nationalism of his political aides and, to a great extent, Mr. Trump himself.

Japan counts gun deaths in single figures annually

Trump said on Monday that Japan could protect itself from a nuclear-armed North Korea by buying billions of dollars of American military equipment, drawing an explicit link between trade and security

And in a remark that held the potential to cause widespread offence in a country where America killed around 140,000 people in 1945 – when it dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – the President added: “Every once in a while, in the past, they underestimated us. It was not pleasant for them, was it?”

Trump said he could not understand why a country of samurai warriors would not shoot down the missile.

Trump’s trip — with bilateral visits to Japan, South Korea and China and stops at regional summits in Vietnam and the Philippines — could go a long way toward determining the success of his administration’s policy.

Two TU-95 aircraft, otherwise known as 'Russian Bear' bombers, skirted the islands of Hoshu and Hokkaido before flying back across the Sea of Japan.

Amid international condemnations of the test, the U.N. Security Council was to meet later in the day to discuss the launch at the request of the United States and Japan

North Korea fired another ballistic missile over Japan on Friday, a direct challenge to the United States and China just days after a new sanctions resolution adopted by the United Nations Security Council

He warned that the regime’s advances in missile technology are complicating Japan’s ability to intercept them.

The missile flew over the northern island of Hokkaido and landed harmlessly in the sea, after a flight of nearly 1,700 miles.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Monday he has earned U.S. President Donald Trump’s backing in seeking closer ties with Russia in a bid to resolve a long-standing territorial row over islands off Hokkaido that Japan wants returned.

President Donald Trump’s grin-and-grip with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in the Oval Office on Friday came off more like a power play between world leaders — and ended with an exaggerated eye roll from Abe.

It’s a dark period in US history, condemned by later presidents as an act of "wartime hysteria," and it’s commemorated in order to remind the country’s present leaders to not fall into similar traps of prejudice and bigotry.