Caroline Kennedy, United States Ambassador to Japan

The nomination of the daughter of the ex-president to the position has been long-awaited. The U.S. Senate must still approve it.

The White House announced on Wednesday that President Barack Obama appointed Caroline Kennedy, daughter of late President John F. Kennedy, to the post of ambassador of the United States of America to Japan.

Caroline Kennedy, 55, whose long-awaited nomination must be confirmed by the U.S. Senate, was one of the key figures to support Barack Obama during his first presidential campaign against Hillary Clinton. “A president like my father,” she wrote, describing Barack Obama, in an article published in the New York Times while the Democratic Party nomination was far from certain for the candidate.

Her uncle, Ted Kennedy, the “old lion” of the Senate who passed away several years ago, also supported candidate Barack Obama, his younger colleague. Caroline Kennedy has also been a speaker at the Democratic National Convention in 2008. In 2012, she was one of the 35 co-chairs of his re-election campaign and participated in a number of fundraising events, gathering together Manhattan’s elite to support the presidential candidate. “She has become one of my dearest friends,” said Obama in January 2008.

Her nomination follows the American tradition of offering ambassadorship positions to well-known individuals without much previous diplomatic experience. This has been the case in previous ambassadorships with Japan as we saw with Walter Mondale, Senator Mike Mansfield, and Thomas Foley, ex-Speaker of the House of Representatives, who were nonetheless “political heavyweights” of their times. However, this has not stopped critics of Caroline Kennedy to cite her inexperience, pointing out current tensions in Asia, including both the relations between Japan and China over the Senkaku Islands or the tensions with North Korea over its nuclear program.

The Japanese government has welcomed Kennedy’s nomination through a statement from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Tokyo. “The Japanese government has observed that Ms. Caroline Kennedy has all the confidence of Mr. Obama and appreciates her nomination which shows the great importance that the Obama administration attaches to US-Japan relations,” underlined the Japanese Ministry.

The document went on to add the Japanese government will make “efforts to improve the relations” between the two countries. Close to 50,000 US servicemen are based on the Japanese Islands under a treaty of bilateral security.