On Tuesday, Donald Trump concluded a three-day visit to Japan, inaugurating his Administration’s first official tour of Asia since Trump took office. It was no accident that the event kicked off at a Japanese country club. Shinzo Abe is one of the few world leaders to enjoy a close rapport with the U.S. President, cultivated through carefully observing and catering to his tastes. After a round on the links, the Prime Minister and President retreated to the clubhouse for hamburgers, where Abe proudly unveiled a gift for Trump and his entourage: a set of gleaming white baseball caps emblazoned with the genially fractured slogan “DONALD & SHINZO, MAKE ALLIANCE EVEN GREATER.”

The gift, somehow managing to be both a little tacky and touching at the same time, was but the first in a series of “Donald & Shinzo” moments over the next few days. That night, the First Families dined in an exclusive Ginza teppanyaki steakhouse. Sensing the explosive potential of making Trump’s dinner choices public, Abe’s entourage kept a tight lid on the details, leaving the Japanese media to prognosticate on potential culinary pitfalls. “Trump’s love of ketchup is well known, as is his penchant for putting personal preference above diplomatic courtesy,” the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper gravely intoned.

The most memorable incident of the trip occurred the following day, during an otherwise unremarkable working lunch at Akasaka Palace, an opulent former imperial residence now used to host visiting dignitaries. A photo op of the two leaders feeding ornamental carp in the palace pond went viral when the President upended his entire box of fish food from a veranda into the serene waters below. Abe, too, had shaken out the contents of his container moments before, but it was Trump, arm outstretched to unleash a rain of pellets on the royal pond in the manner of a hungry child emptying a box of breakfast cereal, whose impulsive pose captured Japan’s imagination. Japanese Twitter churned with hot takes ranging from scolding to mildly appreciative: “That’s not how you do it!” “Donald, you’re over-feeding!” “I love how quickly [American-flag emoji] got bored and went into ‘like, whatever’ mode!” Within hours, a user posted an endlessly looping GIF video; the Sankei Shimbun newspaper ran a shot of the scene, subtitled “American Style?”

But perhaps no moment reveals the unique nature of the Donald & Shinzo relationship better than a picture taken late Monday night. The setting was a state banquet on the final evening of Trump’s visit. The photograph shows the two heads of state standing shoulder to shoulder alongside Pikotaro, the Japanese comedian famed for his viral hit song “Pen Pineapple Apple Pen” (with a hundred and fourteen million YouTube views as of this writing.) “I have had a very valuable experience in my life today,” the singer declared on Twitter, sporting a huge grin, his trademark rectangular sunglasses, and his unmistakable faux-snakeskin-and-leopard outfit. Some locals were unamused: the singer Akiko Wada, who attended the dinner herself, fumed about the two world leaders consorting with entertainers when “we have so many more pressing diplomatic problems.”

But in fact Pikotaro played a strategic, if indirect, role behind the scenes of a surprising thaw in U.S.-Japan relations. Abe’s personal relationship with Barack Obama verged on the prickly, driven by an American perception of the Prime Minister as a dangerously nationalistic historical revisionist. Abe had resigned himself to more of the same arm’s-length treatment under Hillary Clinton, but Trump’s surprise win, in 2016, upended plans like a box full of carp chow. The Prime Minister had viewed Clinton’s victory as such a foregone conclusion that he hadn’t even bothered to meet Trump on a September, 2016, visit to New York City. In an odd throwback to the “Japan-bashing” of the nineteen-eighties, Trump’s campaign rhetoric framed Japan as an enemy for allegedly manipulating currencies and shirking its role in the U.S.-Japan security treaty. “If we’re attacked, Japan doesn’t have to do anything!” Trump thundered on the campaign trail in August, 2016, apparently unaware of the American-drafted constitution forbidding Japan from engaging in military activities beyond its borders. “They can sit home and watch Sony television, O.K.?”

This political fire and brimstone made an emergency return to New York City an inevitability. Abe’s delegation arrived at Trump Tower in late November, 2016, bearing gifts. The $3,755 gold-plated golf club was an obvious, traditional sort of offering. The second, less so: a video of Pikotaro singing “Pen Pineapple Apple Pen,” played by the Abe Administration to help break the ice with the President-elect’s family. This was followed, in April, by a custom-produced version, commissioned by the Japanese Embassy, to convince Ivanka Trump to participate in Washington, D.C.’,s annual Cherry Blossom Festival. The Pikotaro gambit seems to have worked. Abe was one of the first heads of state Trump hosted at Mar-a-Lago, and, out of all the stops on his Asia trip, Trump will have spent the most time in Japan.

In the early years of the twenty-first century, the Japanese government realized that it could harness the power of its pop culture to enhance its image abroad. During his tenure in 2008–9, Abe’s predecessor, Aso Taro, proposed the “soft power” of “Cool Japan” as a new cornerstone of his nation’s economic strategy, and Abe launched a “Japan Brand Fund” to great local fanfare in 2013. These initiatives were aimed at broad demographics: using the popularity of Pokémon games, or Naruto comic books, or Godzilla movies, or Hello Kitty products, to appeal to young people around the world. But Abe has cannily grasped that Trump is a demographic of one. After the success with Pikotaro, the Washington Post reported, the Japanese Embassy then “called the company that makes the video game and anime character Pikachu and ordered up stuffed dolls, and acquired other traditional Japanese toys, to entertain [Ivanka] Trump’s young children.” We are living in a world where a Japanese Prime Minister can use pop culture to appeal not only to global audiences generally but to Presidents specifically—or, at least, this specific President.

The question is whether it will pay off in the long run. On the one hand, few would argue against maintaining warm relations with the leader of a superpower and key ally. On the other, this particular relationship must have its white-knuckle moments. After North Korea launched a series of missiles over Japan, earlier this year, the U.S. President said that “he could not understand why a country of samurai warriors did not shoot down the missiles,” the Japanese wire service Kyodo reported. And in a press conference in Tokyo last week, Trump expressed the “warmest admiration for this ancient culture. It’s an ancient culture, and its customs are ancient, and it’s terrific.”

To be fair, there were moments of real diplomacy during Trump’s visit. The highlight may have been his meeting with a delegation of families of abductees still missing after being kidnapped off the streets by North Korean agents, in the nineteen-seventies. The gesture was received warmly for renewing the dialogue over a truly despicable series of incidents that many Japanese feel their own leaders are not doing enough to address.

Still, many Japanese are leery about the Faustian deal that their Prime Minister has struck with the Trump Administration. A survey conducted in the weeks prior to Trump’s visit revealed that forty-four per cent of Japanese viewed the relationship as bad for Japan. Ironically, the President himself may have summed the situation up most succinctly. “The Japanese people are thriving. Your cities are vibrant and you’ve built one of the world’s most powerful economies,” Trump said at a press conference on the final day of his visit. But then the President paused before adding a personal addendum. “I don’t know if it’s as good as ours. I think not. O.K.? We’re going to try to keep it that way. And you’ll be second.”