One summit does not make a summer, but next week’s meeting in Tokyo between the leaders of Japan, China and South Korea has the smell of pivotal geopolitics. For Japan-focused investors, desperate for something to fatten up the now emaciated Abenomics theme, the meeting gives off the scent of a new trade.

Until now, China’s trumpeted enthusiasm for the “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI) to redraw global economic lines on a Eurasia axis has been almost inaudible to Japan. Despite the $1.5tn BRI-related investment planned for the next decade, Japanese companies, media and politicians have shown no more than modest interest. China has also looked exclusive — no maps of the BRI’s proposed six corridors of international co-operation show routes reaching Asia’s second-biggest economy.

But the May 9 meeting, which follows an April relaunch of Japan and China’s “high-level economic summit” after an eight-year hiatus, could mark a change of thinking in Tokyo and, as it contemplates a trade war with the US, in China too. One signal of that was an agreement this year to make China’s Fujian province a model region for bilateral co-operation.