# Takaichi Heads to New York to Get to Trump Before Xi Does > Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi will sit down with President Trump on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly just two days before he meets Chinese President Xi Jinping in Washington, giving Tokyo a narrow window to shape the American view heading into that summit. - Source: Morning Sun - Canonical URL: https://morningsun.jpn.com/article/takaichi-heads-to-new-york-to-get-to-trump-before-xi-does - Author: Morning Sun Editorial - Section: Politics - Published: 2026-09-19T13:21:55.886Z - Updated: 2026-09-19T13:21:55.886Z - Tags: Sanae Takaichi, Donald Trump, Japan, United States, United Nations, China, Xi Jinping, Diplomacy --- President Trump will hold a bilateral meeting with Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, a sit down confirmed by US Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz alongside Trump's plans to address the assembly and meet separately with British Prime Minister Andy Burnham during the same trip. For Takaichi, the timing of the meeting matters as much as the meeting itself. The talks are scheduled for just two days before Trump travels to Washington for a summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping, giving Takaichi a narrow but valuable window to shape how the American side approaches that conversation. Officials in Tokyo see the sequencing as a chance to convey Japan's read on China directly to Trump before he sits across from Xi, rather than having to react afterward to whatever emerges from that meeting. ## A relationship measured in short intervals Tuesday's meeting would mark at least the fourth in person encounter between the two leaders since Takaichi took office in October 2025, a pace of contact that reflects how central the alliance with Washington has become to her foreign policy approach. Their first face to face summit took place in Tokyo in late October of that year, and the relationship has been built through a steady rhythm of meetings rather than long gaps punctuated by occasional high profile visits. This particular meeting also carries a different backdrop than their previous encounters. It marks the first time the two leaders will meet in person since Washington stepped in to help support the yen through a joint currency intervention over the summer, an episode that underscored just how closely the two governments have been coordinating on economic matters that go well beyond traditional security cooperation. ## What Takaichi wants Trump to hear Beyond the optics of frequent contact, Takaichi is expected to use the meeting to reinforce two connected messages: that the Japan US alliance remains as solid as ever, and that Washington should weigh Tokyo's perspective on China carefully as it heads into its own high level engagement with Beijing. Japan has its own unresolved friction with China at the moment, stemming from Takaichi's earlier remarks about a potential Taiwan contingency, giving her an added incentive to make sure Trump hears Tokyo's perspective before rather than after his conversation with Xi. ## The UN as a diplomatic waystation The General Assembly's annual gathering has become a recurring venue for exactly this kind of sequenced diplomacy, where leaders use overlapping travel schedules to fit in bilateral meetings that would otherwise require separate, harder to arrange trips. For Takaichi, using the UN sidelines to reach Trump ahead of his Beijing focused summit is a practical way to make the most of a single trip rather than requesting a standalone visit to Washington on a tighter timeline. Whether the meeting produces any concrete shift in how Trump approaches his conversation with Xi is impossible to know in advance, but the fact that Tokyo arranged the timing so deliberately says plenty about how seriously Takaichi's government is treating the sequence of encounters among the three governments this week. --- Originally published by Morning Sun. Free to cite with attribution and a link to https://morningsun.jpn.com/article/takaichi-heads-to-new-york-to-get-to-trump-before-xi-does.