Despite being just 30 minutes from U.S. President George W. Bush, the G8 Press Center in Rusutsu, Hokkaido, may have been the safest place in the world for a journalist July 7-9. It certainly felt like the place least likely to be mown down by a passing car, as I tried to cross the road outside the center to the 7-Eleven on the other side. “Dame desu, please use the crossing,” came the voices of no fewer than three policemen behind me. I looked left and right. The only visible danger to life and limb was a lone motorbike cop slowly riding past a long line of bored officers strung out every 50 meters. My heart went out to them: Some were in full riot gear in this muggy heat; some were from Saitama.

“There are no cars. I promise to take care,” I said. One cop’s face twitched worryingly. “Please,” he said in English. “Japanese rule.”

I walked the 70 meters or so down to the crossing, but as I went to put a foot on the road another voice sang out. “The traffic light is still red.”

There was no place for the repeat jaywalking offender to hide in this open countryside.

Inside the center more pedantic policing kept us safe from harm. Did I have a bomb in my tape recorder or camera, or liquid explosives in my water bottle? Would I make sure my pass – procured from MOFA after submitting press card, passport and letter from employer – was facing outward at all times, even when leaving to go outside? This being Japan, the policing was impeccably polite, “Please, OK?” being the universal preface to yet another bag search.

People from a private security firm called Rising Sun manned checkpoints at the entrance to the building and at press conferences, and rode around on two-wheeled electric scooters. “Did you know George Bush once fell off one of these on TV?” I asked a stiff-necked guard, dressed in fascist-light black and wraparound shades. “They run on batteries and are very environmentally friendly,” was the puzzling non sequitur that came back.

The fun and games stopped inside the main media room, crowded with stressed hacks from every corner of the globe. Their job was to decipher the impenetrable bureaucratese emerging from the G8 headquarters in the Hotel Windsor, 35 km away, and file a stroke-inducing number of stories per day. It struck me at several points of the summit that if the organizers had relayed the press conferences to remote monitors, most of these stories could have been filed from home. At least there, nobody takes over my desk with coffee cups and cellotapes the name of their organization over mine, not even my wife.

Anyway, the climax of all this activity came on Day Two, July 8, when the leaders published their much-anticipated thoughts on climate change.

To give No.1 readers a flavor of this document, I quote the key passage almost in full: “We seek to share with all parties to the UNFCCC [United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change] the vision of, and together with them to consider and adopt in the UNFCCC negotiations, the goal of achieving at least 50 percent reduction of global emissions by 2050… consistent with the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities.”

I admit to having felt crushing performance anxiety when I saw this press release.

What did it mean? Was it the long-awaited breakthrough? If so, why didn’t it just say something like: “We agree to halve climate change gases by 2050?” Irish Times Foreign Editor Paddy Smyth was already awake in Dublin and sending me messages, asking for my take.

“Paddy, you’ve wasted your money because I don’t have a fucking clue,” I briefly thought about replying.

As the icy hand of writer’s block began tightening around my bowels, the story was already going up online.

According to the BBC and The Guardian, the climate announcement was a “historic” breakthrough, but NGO press releases dumped on my desk were disagreeing, to put it at its mildest: “A wasted opportunity” (ActionAid); “A fudge” (Greenpeace); “By 2050 the world will be cooked” (Oxfam). Perhaps MOFA spokesman Koji Tsuruoka would come to the rescue. “It is a significant advance,” he said at Japan’s evening briefing, “not a breakthrough.”

“We’re on our own at times like this,” I told the Inner David – the stronger, better-looking one – then sat down to write my story, which started like this: Leaders of the world’s richest countries offered hope on climate change yesterday with the announcement of a highly ambiguous “shared vision” to halve global CO2 emissions by 2050. The deal, worked out after all-night talks, was immediately condemned by environmentalists, who say it does not go far enough, but Group of Eight (G8) host Japan hailed it as a milestone.

Was it any worse or better than the stories winging their way around the planet?

Before I even had time to digest what was on the page, another story was due. The laptop finally slammed shut at 1 a.m. A French reporter beside me was glued to his screen, and I realized he hadn’t moved in hours. He didn’t even look up when a British ITN reporter began, hilariously, rehearsing for a live feed by performing loud mouth exercises in front of the camera yards away. Writer’s block.

On Day Three, Wednesday, the big event was the host press conference, to which I arrived late with The Times’ Richard Lloyd Parry, almost getting rugby-tackled at the entrance by an over-enthusiastic official.

Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda seemed so self-effacing and polite; you had to struggle to remember that he was the enemy, deliberately strewing our path with obtuse linguistic and factual landmines. David Pilling of The Financial Times tried to defuse one: deliberate fudging on the starting of CO2 cuts. Doesn’t the fact that the EU says 1990 and Japan says 2008 make a mockery of the whole deal? Fukuda’s meandering answer, relayed through an umming and aahing translator made no sense to me except for the last sentence: “So therefore, there is no confusion.”

A Japanese magazine reporter approached me after the presser with that old canard loaded and ready to go: Are there differences in how the Japanese and foreign journalists are reporting the event? Well, I suggested, the Japanese press seems a little less adversarial; a bit more likely to reproduce exactly what’s on the summit releases. But perhaps the details of the deal will come out in weeklies like yours? I gave her my best smile, and she asked if I could repeat what I’d said in English because she hadn’t understood my Japanese.

Life was slowly draining out of the media center, but Pio D’Emilia of Italian Sky TG24 was stalking reporters with his cameraman, asking them if they knew that the ¥5 billion media center would be torn down after we left. If so, it’s another own goal for a team that, amazingly, served caviar, champagne and milk-fed lamb to the leaders of the richest countries while discussing the global food crisis. You couldn’t make it up, not even the U.K. Sun, which was one of many newspapers that feasted greedily on the menu – helpfully and lovingly translated into English – by reproducing it in their pages beside a picture of a starving African boy.

I called the MOFA spokeswoman who took notes with a “what-next” air. Ten minutes later she came back: The center cost ¥3 billion, not ¥5 billion, and it is made of 95 percent recyclable materials. An invisible “so there” dangles on the line between us before I thank her and head back to file my final story.

In the hotel preparing for the trip back, I tried to stuff my G8 booty into a bag and failed. The press pack: a portable light for a laptop, rechargeable batteries, chopsticks, pens, eraser, adhesive, furoshiki and a watch could come; the coffee-table book on Hokkaido, maps, handouts and leaders’ photographs would have to stay. Last thing to go into my bag was the English-language version of “Megumi,” a manga rendering of Megumi Yokota’s kidnapping by North Korea, handed out free to all those journalists. Reading it on the plane back, I’m surprised to find myself blinded by tears. On a human level, the story is heartbreaking, but again I wonder at the national obsession with this tragedy.

The day before the Hokkaido Summit, ubiquituous TV presenter Mina Monta opined on his breakfast show that with 4,000 journalists from around the world, Japan – at last – would have the opportunity to get the message about the NK abductions out there. With the planet cooking, the economy tanking, millions of people falling into poverty and America running its own renditions program, how much chance was there of that?

Back at Haneda Airport on July 11, I pick up two English-language newspapers. Headline in The Japan Times: “Emerging Economies Turn Down CO2 Deal.” Headline in the International Herald Tribune: “G8 Joined by Poorer Nations on Emissions.”

It’s small comfort that I wasn’t the only one thrown on Tuesday by that great slab of G8 verbiage, which created just enough fog to hide the leaders’ escape.

Somewhere over the Pacific Ocean a failed Texan businessman is snickering into his Diet Coke: “Mission Accomplished.” ❶