ANCHORAGE, Alaska -U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has canceled her visit to the Port of Yokohama during her visit to Japan next week out of deference following the assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, a Treasury official said on Saturday.
Abe was fatally shot on Friday while giving a campaign speech on a street in the western city of Nara.
Yellen had been scheduled to visit the port on Tuesday for a roundtable with business leaders, tour the facilities and deliver a speech.
Separately, the State Department said late on Saturday that Secretary Antony Blinken was adding a stop in Tokyo in the coming days as part of his Asia trip to offer condolences to the Japanese people on Abe’s death and to meet senior Japanese officials.
The Treasury official said Yellen’s bilateral meetings in Japan would still take place. She is scheduled to meet Minister of Finance Suzuki Shunichi on Tuesday.
Yellen’s aircraft stopped briefly to refuel at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage on the way to Tokyo. Former President Donald Trump was also in town to raise money for U.S. House of Representatives candidate Sarah Palin and other Republican candidates.
Yellen will participate in a meeting of the Group of 20 major economies in Indonesia and meet officials from South Korea as she seeks to build support for a price cap on Russian oil during her trip to Asia, the Treasury Department said on Friday.
The trip, Yellen’s first visit to the Indo-Pacific region as treasury secretary, comes amid nagging questions about how well a price cap on Russian oil could work without the support of India and others now buying cheap Russian oil.
(Reporting by Andrea Shalal, additional reporting by David Shepardson; Writing by Daphne Psaledakis; Editing by Franklin Paul and Sandra Maler)
