http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/08/business/international/unease-after-trump-depicts-tokyo-as-an-economic-rival.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share&_r=2Unease After Donald Trump Depicts Tokyo as an Economic RivalBy JONATHAN SOBLE and KEITH BRADSHERMARCH 7, 2016
TOKYO — Donald J. Trump has often aimed his raucous brand of disparagement at foreign countries during his presidential run. There is China, “ripping off” the United States on trade and stealing its jobs. And Mexico, closing its eyes to a flood of migrants and drugs across the border.
But his preoccupation with Japan is perhaps more unusual, if not anachronistic.
Mr. Trump chastised Japan last week in a Republican candidates’ debate, naming it along with China and Mexico as countries where “we are getting absolutely crushed on trade.” He has previously accused Japan of manipulating its currency to achieve an unfair economic advantage, and of exploiting its military alliance with the United States to protect itself at little risk and cost.
His complaints are reminiscent of another era, when Japan’s economy was booming and its companies were buying trophy American assets like movie studios and Rockefeller Center. Since the 1990s, though, Japan’s growth has been mostly flat, and trade friction much more subdued, even as the United States continues to run large trade deficits with Japan.
Whereas Japanese officials once feared so-called Japan-bashing by Americans, today they are more likely to lament “Japan-passing,” a shift in attention to places viewed as more dynamic, like China.
“Trump’s comments on Japan remind me of the period from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s, when Japan was considered a serious rival to American economic pre-eminence,” said Glen S. Fukushima, a former United States trade official who is now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a liberal policy group. “It’s interesting that despite the two-decade stagnation of the Japanese economy, Trump is now reviving the idea of Japan as an economic rival robbing America of jobs.”
Or, as Robert E. Kelly, an East Asia specialist at Pusan National University in South Korea, put it on Twitter during the Republican debate: “Japan, Japan, Japan again. Trump is living in the Michael Crichton ’80s.” (Mr. Crichton’s best-selling novel “Rising Sun,” published in 1992, depicted a Japan that waged ruthless economic war against the United States.)
Mr. Trump’s ascendance has begun to cause serious unease in Japan. Even if his run ends short of the White House, the worry is that an election dominated by such talk could leave the United States more closed to trade and less willing to defend its allies.
“My friends in the Foreign Ministry are in a state of panic,” said Kiichi Fujiwara, an expert on international politics at the University of Tokyo. “This is the first time in a long time that we’ve seen straightforward protectionism from an American presidential candidate.”
Major Japanese newspapers published critical editorials a day after Mr. Trump’s sweeping victories in the Super Tuesday primaries last week.
“If there is a big shake-up in American politics, there is a danger that Japan could become an outlet for popular dissatisfaction with the spread of inequality and other issues,” The Nikkei financial daily said.
One concern is that Mr. Trump’s rivals will shift to more isolationist positions to counter him. Last month, Hillary Clinton, the Democratic front-runner, who is also contending with skepticism on trade from her party rival, Bernie Sanders, criticized China and Japan in an opinion piece published in American regional newspapers.
“China, Japan and other Asian economies kept their goods artificially cheap for years by holding down the value of their currencies,” she wrote, adding that the United States should consider “effective new remedies, such as duties or tariffs.”
Mrs. Clinton has also backed away from her support of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a 12-nation trade deal that includes Japan and is awaiting ratification by the participating countries. She helped promote the deal as secretary of state.
“We’re already drawing up new laws and regulations, but it could all unravel,” said a senior Japanese official involved in the deal, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the discussions are confidential. “Our best hope is to ratify it quickly, along with other countries, to put pressure on the U.S. to follow through.”
As he does with China, Mr. Trump accuses Japan of taking American jobs.
After his victories on Super Tuesday, he called out Komatsu, a Japanese manufacturer of construction machinery, saying the weak yen gave it an unfair advantage over its American rival Caterpillar. He pledged to use equipment from Caterpillar and John Deere, another American manufacturer, to build his promised wall on the border with Mexico to keep out illegal immigrants.
Globalization has stirred the public anxiety over jobs that Mr. Trump is seizing on. Japan exports more than twice as much to the United States as it buys.
But globalization has also blurred lines between foreign and domestic companies in ways not accounted for in Mr. Trump’s criticisms.
In addition to its factories in Japan, Komatsu has plants overseas, including three in the United States — though it imports key components, like hydraulic pumps and motors, from Japan, where it also keeps its high-paying design and engineering operations. Caterpillar and John Deere are much the same, manufacturing at home and overseas but keeping engineering mostly in the United States.
Televisions at an electronics store in Tokyo last week were tuned to a news item about Donald Trump. Credit Shizuo Kambayashi/Associated Press
Still, Mr. Trump’s attacks could play well in places like Michigan and Ohio, important primary states.
Their economies have suffered as manufacturing has moved abroad. Carmakers and unions, still influential forces in those states, have been vocal critics of the way Japan’s government has let the yen depreciate.
“The last thing I want to do is come off as defending Donald Trump, but there is an issue with the yen,” said an official at the United Automobile Workers union, which traditionally supports Democrats.
Japan’s currency has fallen as much as 40 percent against the dollar since 2012, though it is up somewhat this year. The decline has made Japanese carmakers like Toyota and Honda more profitable by increasing the value of their overseas sales.
Japanese officials say the yen’s fall is simply a side effect of domestic policies aimed at ending persistent deflation, not a deliberate effort to gain an edge in trade. Yet Prime Minister Shinzo Abe campaigned openly in 2012 for weakening the yen to aid Japanese manufacturers.
“Just because the Japanese government no longer repeats that, doesn’t mean the goal has changed,” said Stephen E. Biegun, Ford’s vice president for international governmental affairs.
No one can accuse Mr. Trump of coming to the issue late. He has been saying many of the same things for decades.
“They come over here, they sell their cars, their VCRs. They knock the hell out of our companies,” he told Oprah Winfrey in 1988. In a Playboy interview in 1990, he said: “First they take all our money with their consumer goods, then they put it back in buying all of Manhattan.”
On military matters, Mr. Trump has expressed dissatisfaction with the United States’ decades-old alliance with Japan. It obliges the United States to go to Japan’s aid if Japan is attacked. But Japan is not obliged to do the same, because of its war-renouncing Constitution, which was imposed by occupying American forces after World War II.
Mr. Abe says he, too, is unhappy with the “unbalanced” alliance. He has been trying to carve out a more active role for Japan’s military, despite opposition from constitutional experts and much of the Japanese public.
If the United States turned toward isolationism, the Japanese prime minister would be emboldened. But it would be a delicate balancing act. An American disengagement from Asia in the face of an increasingly assertive China and North Korea would be a harrowing situation for Japan’s leaders.
“The U.S. has been saying for some time that Japan needs to bear more of the burden for regional stability,” said Jiro Aichi, a member of Parliament from Mr. Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party. “Trump is saying it in a more extreme way, but it’s a fact that Japan has to do more.”
