Caroline Kennedy stepped down Wednesday after three years as U. S. ambassador to Japan, where she was welcomed like a celebrity and worked to deepen the U. S.-Japan relationship despite regular flare-ups over American military bases on the southern island of Okinawa.
Appointed by President Barack Obama in 2013, she had been expected to leave with the coming change in U. S. leadership. President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team has also said that all envoys who were political appointees must step down by Inauguration Day on Friday. Trump has not named a new ambassador yet.
Kennedy ruffled some feathers early in her tenure by tweeting her opposition to Japan’s dolphin hunt, shortly after her embassy issued a statement expressing “disappointment” that Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe had visited a shrine that memorializes World War II war criminals, among others.
During her time, though, the conservative Abe and liberal Obama found common ground despite coming from opposite ends of the political spectrum.
“She has great skills and authority as a convener, a much needed function in U. S.-Japan relations,” said Kent Calder, the director of the Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D. C. “She has been more of a network builder than a concrete policy initiator, but that is almost an inevitable role for ambassadors these days.
