TOKYO — TOKYO -In her first trip abroad as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton issued a sharp warning yesterday to North Korea over its threatened missile test, signed a military agreement with Japan and conferred with senior Japanese officials on topics that included the enveloping world financial crisis.
But a 45-minute "town hall" meeting at the University of Tokyo also gave the country's chief diplomat a chance to project a softer American image. She avoided the phrase war on terror, which was standard terminology during the George W. Bush years. And she touched on topics that included climate change, families, global poverty, the need for healthy habits among the elderly, and baseball.
A young woman in pigtails asked how to get along on a baseball team with lots of bigger, more powerful men.
"I've played a lot of baseball," Clinton told the woman and the others in the audience. "I've played with a lot of boys. The most important advice is to do what's true to yourself."
The university students weren't shy about going beyond Clinton's official duties and asking for mentoring.
A law student asked her advice on whether she should have children or push for gender equality by pursuing a career.
"I don't think you have to make a choice between contributing with children or gender equality," Clinton said, adding that "society needs to do more" to make it easier for women to balance their roles.
As her first official trip, the Asian tour is meant as a signal of the importance of the region to U.S. interests, emphasizing ties to Japan, the growing importance of China and the threat posed by North Korea. The trip also signals the region's importance as a place for Clinton to make her mark as secretary of state.
After spending two days in Japan, Clinton planned to travel today to Indonesia, where President Barack Obama lived for a time as a youth, and then to South Korea and China.
Clinton was joined yesterday by Empress Michiko at the Imperial Palace for afternoon tea. They met in 1994, when Bill Clinton was president and the empress and Emperor Akihito visited the United States.
Clinton also spent about 30 minutes with the families of Japanese who were abducted by North Korean agents in the 1980s and 1990s. Japan insists that the fate of the abductees, as they are known, must be resolved before there can be any normalization of relations with North Korea.
