The Mainichi Shimbun, Japan’s oldest newspaper and its newspaper of record, is covering the killing of Daphne Caruana Galizia and the political context in Malta. It’s so far that the stories have to start by explaining to readers where Malta is.

Doing like the prime minister and stubbornly complaining of “bias” in the face of all this coverage is not going to make things any easier.

As Georg Sapiano observed earlier today many of us may have stopped wanting to think about the causes and consequences of Daphne’s assassination hours after we heard the news. But we’ll have to think about it really hard when the fact the rest of the world is still talking about will start hurting our pockets.

It took 25 years to patiently rebuild Malta’s reputation from shootings in the streets, killings in police custody and cooperation with Ghaddafi as US warplanes flew overhead to bomb his house.

It took 5 years for Labour to knock it all down. They’re not seeing picture postcards of Malta in Japan.