So one can only wonder how shook up Elvis must have been today, while he looked down from his great big stage in the sky, to see the US President and the Japanese Prime Minister as they flew on Air Force One to visit Graceland, watching Elvis movies, tasting fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches, shortly after serenading each other to his hit song I Want You, I Need You, I Love You.

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

The tour of Graceland, a farewell gift from Mr 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. Only one issue dominated the agenda. It was not the nuclear ambitions of North Korea, nor was it the Iraq conflict. It was the Japanese leader’s lifelong, loving obsession with Elvis.

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 stocked 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 that it was the first English song he learnt, and he invoked it to toast continued US-Japanese relations.

Mr Bush welcomed Mr Koizumi to the White House by comparing the Japanese leader 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 very much, 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, the leader, 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 an incumbent American President — let alone a Japanese one — the leaders were shown around the property by Presley’s former wife, Priscilla, and their daughter, Lisa Marie Presley. They saw an exhibition of Elvis’s personal possessions, and his dubious taste in home furnishings, including a shag pile carpet on the ceiling of the Jungle Room.

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