SHORTLY before he died Elvis Presley could take the frenzied adulation no more. He retreated to his Graceland mansion, gorged on fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches and binged on drugs. He thought the world had gone mad.

So one can only wonder how shook up Elvis must have been yesterday as he looked down from his great big stage in the sky to see the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of Japan fly on Air Force One to Graceland. There they watched Elvis films and serenaded each other with I Want You, I Need You, I Love You, while their staff munched on fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches.

Tony Snow, the White House spokesman, was even wearing gold-rimmed plastic sunglasses, as the plane’s public address system belted out Love Me Tender and Don’t Be Cruel.

The tour of Graceland, a farewell gift from President Bush to Junichiro Koizumi on his last visit to America before he leaves office in September, capped one of the strangest official US visits by a world leader in recent times.

Just one issue dominated the agenda. It wasn’t North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, nor the war in Iraq. It was the Japanese leader’s lifelong, loving obsession with Elvis Presley.

The extraordinarily close personal rapport between the two leaders, helped in no small measure by Mr Koizumi’s politically courageous decision to send 500 Japanese troops to Iraq, has brought their countries closer than at any time since the Second World War.

Mr Bush, during an official White House dinner on Thursday night, called his counterpart a “treasured friend”, and to prove it he turned the two-day visit into the Elvis summit.

Mr Bush surprised Mr Koizumi with a gift of a restored 1954 Seeburg R100 jukebox filled with 45 songs, including 25 Presley hits. “Prime Minister Koizumi searched the keys and found I Want You, I Need You, I Love You,” Laura Bush, the First Lady, said. “He and the President sang a duet.”

Mr Koizumi said it was the first English song he had learnt, and invoked it to toast continued US-Japanese relations. Mr Bush welcomed Mr Koizumi by comparing him to Elvis. “Like you, he had great hair. Like you, he was known to sing in public. And like you, he won admirers in countries far from home.” Mr Koizumi replied: “Thank you, American people, for Love Me Tender ”.

With North Korea making preparations to test a long-range missile, one almost expected the men to describe Kim Jong Il as a hound dog, but they stopped just short. Mr Bush called the missile test plan “unacceptable”.

At Graceland, the first visit to Elvis’s Memphis home by a sitting US President — let alone a Japanese one — the leaders were shown around by Presley’s ex-wife Priscilla and their daughter, Lisa Marie Presley. They saw Elvis’s personal possessions and his dubious taste in home furnishings.

But even to two of the most powerful men in the world, some parts of Graceland are off limits. Like ordinary tourists, they were not allowed a peek at the private upstairs quarters, including the bedroom and bathroom where Elvis died of heart disease and drug abuse in 1977.

Before the cameras at the end of the private tour, Mr Koizumi, at the invitiation of Mr Bush, sang “Love Me Tender, Wise men say ‘Only fools rush in’.” Draping his arm around Lisa Marie Presley, Mr Koizumi then crooned “Hold me close, hold me tight”. He then put on sunglasses and did some Elvis dance moves.

“It’s like a dream,” he told reporters later. He then broke into more song: “To dream, the impossible dream.”

Times Recommends

• Please help: maimed children of war want their lives back
• Cabal seizes diamond riches to buy power
• White House gatecrashers got to the president