BEIJING -- Days after coming to power in September, Japan's new prime minister broached forming a new East Asian trading bloc with rival China - one that would exclude the United States.

Some in Washington took it as a snub from the nation that has been America's rock in Asia for decades. Even more, Tokyo's new rhetoric underscored how China's rapid rise to power is challenging Washington's once-dominant sway in the region.

This is the reality President Barack Obama confronts as he departs Thursday for his first Asia trip, perhaps his most challenging overseas journey yet. He'll find a region outgrowing a half-century of U.S. supremacy and questioning America's relevance to its future. More so than Obama's previous foreign trips, this nine-day, four-country tour has the president on something like a salvage mission.

The trip also comes at a delicate time for Obama at home.

He is wrestling with one of the toughest decisions of his 10-month presidency, a war strategy for Afghanistan, and is urging Congress to approve his biggest domestic priority, health care.

Those pressing concerns make it notable that he is spending so much time away - a sign of Asia's importance to the U.S. and the need to tend to relationships there without delay - though he put off his original departure by a day over the weekend because of Thursday's deadly shooting spree at the Fort Hood military base in Texas. Obama will speak to U.S. troops in Alaska and South Korea, with his much-awaited decision on more troops for the Afghanistan war probably still pending.

Obama stops first in Japan, a traditional U.S. stalwart now looking toward closer engagement with China and the rest of Asia. He makes a two-city stop in China, where leaders proud of their country's one-generation leap to prosperity seek a bigger say in shaping the region's affairs.

The president also visits Singapore for a summit of Asia-Pacific leaders, where his participation is being cut by a day, and wraps up his trip in South Korea. Those countries are having to accommodate a more muscular China while wondering whether a U.S. weakened by financial crisis is in decline.

"Asia is changing very fast. It's undergoing a fundamental transition," said Huang Jing, a Chinese politics expert at the National University of Singapore. "This is not the kind of Asia or Asia-Pacific of America's traditional understanding. That old understanding is that America is dominant but friendly to the developing nations and Japan, America's perpetual ally, is No. 1. Asia is now totally different and China is the No. 1, not Japan."

Throughout his travels, starting with a scene-setting speech in Japan, Obama is expected to deliver a message of staunch U.S. commitment to old friends and newer partners alike, promising to help keep what for decades has been one of the fastest growing regions of the world secure and thriving, according to U.S. officials.

In Tokyo, he's likely to call for a reinvigorated alliance with Japan while insisting that new Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama live up to a pending agreement on reconfiguring U.S. military bases. He's scheduled to take part in Beijing in the kind of pomp that Chinese leaders crave as a sign of respect, but also plans an event with Chinese university students aimed at telegraphing U.S. values to a broader Chinese audience.

On the sidelines of the gathering of Asia-Pacific leaders, he'll hold a first-ever summit with Southeast Asia's 10-nation alliance, a grouping whose economies are increasingly tied to a growing China but still are anxious about Chinese power. Included in that meeting will be Myanmar's leader - the first such meeting between a U.S. president and the head of a repressive government formerly shunned by Washington, though now part of a new outreach by the Obama administration.

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