I agree with you.
I have had ocassion to be around Japanese nobility.
The manners are quite exquisite, and designed to invoke a profound feeling of respect and even love.
This is a bizzarro bow, an false bow, deceitful.
And I had not thought about it, (thank you for the reminder) , but you are right about the Koreans and the Chinese.They will be quite sure now that they are dealing with a psychopomp, a narcist from whom they can get anything they want by stroking him just right.
Obama is about to be pimped all over the Orient.
They will play him like a stradivarious all around Asia now, particularly in Beijing, and even where he is not going, in enemy Pyongyang.
This was the tone he set at the OAS meeting where Chavez stepped up and used him, whereupon Zelaya in Honduras was immediately emboldened to try to seize unending power through a referendum coup and had to be constitutionally removed, I am convinced (looking at the timeline).
This is dangerous. This imagery can become the precursors to the precursors to war, because it emboldens the enemy in their psych profiling of our leaders and whether they are made of "the stuff" or not.
Now watch North Korea REALLY start to test him, to rattle his cage to see if he gets the squirts, by stepping up provocations in the Yellow (West) Sea along the NLL and the DMZ, prior to him going to Seoul next week.
But he'll probably like that.