Conan O’Brien proves he’s America’s best ambassador on trip to Japan

Conan O’Brien put international relations ahead of personal pride when he traveled to Conan Town, Japan.

Plenty has been written about how the U.S. has taken a hit on the world stage since 2016. Not everyone is a fan of how the country is being run or treating other countries. One way to fix that? Send Conan O’Brien to as many places as possible.

The late night host’s travel specials, “Conan Without Borders,” have been a huge hit. They also seem to have reinvigorated Conan who is now 25 years into his late night career. It’s part of the reason his show will return from hiatus in 2019 with a new format.

O’Brien’s latest travel adventure brought him to Japan. We’ve already seen him rent a family for the day and share a traditional meal with producer Jordan Schlansky. Now we can watch a Japanese news report covering O’Brien’s stop in the town of Hokuei, also known as Conan Town.

Conan’s beef with the town obviously comes from the name. The town uses Conan Town to honor manga artist Gosho Aoyama. It didn’t take long for O’Brien to find out about this and call out Detective Conan, the series Aoyama is known for creating.

That move set things off between the late night host and Japanese town. But it looks like all it took for American-Japanese relations to be improved was Australian hamburgers. Maybe those should be a standard feature of any future U.S. diplomatic missions.

The clip shows that when it comes down to it, Conan is much more interested in humility and bringing people together than anything else. During these travel specials he knows when to make himself the joke and when to make everyone around him comfortable.

It is a philosophy that more of us could certainly look to adopt. It’s easy to generalize and make assumptions about other cultures and countries. But through his travels, Conan shows that we may be much more alike than different. We all get frustrated at the bank sometimes and we all enjoy a nice hamburger.