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For the head of a 177-year-old listed company, there’s no hard and fast way to prevent people comparing you to a mafia boss. One conventional tactic, though, has been to avoid holding a 106-minute press conference where you threaten to ruin your enemy completely, seize his house and take his dog.
But convention has entered 2025 bruised, confused and cowering against a worse pummelling to come. Is 21st-century Japan worse than evil? Is it the master villain? Is it a brainwashing bloodsucker? It may not think so, but the country should prepare for a discourse where chief executives of American companies don’t mind saying it is.
On the dog possession, Lourenco Goncalves, CEO of US steelmaker Cleveland-Cliffs, was ready with calculatedly unconventional bada bing. He is so confident that he could take everything (car, house, last penny) from Eiji Hashimoto, CEO of Nippon Steel, that he told reporters he had already begun looking into the rules around exporting dogs from Japan to the US.
The vituperation built from there. This week’s press conference — ostensibly summoned to explain Cleveland-Cliffs’ plan to buy US Steel now President Joe Biden has blocked Nippon’s bid on national security grounds — had a malevolence that stretched far beyond a conventional M&A clash. It fitted comfortably, however, into the mood of the week before Donald Trump is sworn back in.
Nippon Steel has filed a suit accusing Goncalves of running a campaign to derail its merger with US Steel and of using tactics “more befitting of a mafia boss than the CEO of a publicly traded company”. Goncalves, who said he would take legal action against Hashimoto in the US over the allegations, made his retort a snarling, blistering attack on Japan itself. In it he warned multiple times of the folly of crossing Trump and, at one point, grabbed an American flag.
“China is bad. China is evil. China is horrible. But Japan is worse,” he said, adding: “You did not learn anything since 1945. You did not learn how good we are, how gracious we are.” He added: “Stop sucking our blood.”
This was all very unsettling indeed. Many will have decided to dismiss Goncalves’s performance as uniquely deranged, and the attack on Japan as a raging, counterfactual haymaker.
A wiser take may be to see it, however ugly, for its coherence, its origins and for the very precise blow it lands on convention. The rise and return of Trump has been framed by some as a rolling series of rejections, by him and his supporters, of ideas, institutions, behaviours and interpretations that long seemed invulnerable. It is an environment in which Japan should be wary, but at least now it has a sense of where the attack might come from.
At one key moment, Goncalves recommended that his audience watch a revealing YouTube video of Trump being interviewed by Larry King in 1987. In it, the future president railed against Japan as a “money machine” with which the US had been far too accommodating and generous. He was tired, he said, “of watching other countries ripping off the United States”.
Trump was certainly not alone in that interpretation: a then-common note of despair at US economic slippage made just as the Japanese bubble was expanding and US supremacy seemed in real doubt. The gains of Japanese makers of steel, electronics, cars and motorbikes came, indisputably, at the cost of American rivals.
Trump may have been too busy to devour the many serious analyses published around that time that dissected the US-Japan relationship with warnings against Japanese industrial policy, and nervousness around American deindustrialisation. But the sense of all-out economic conflict was in the ether. Benevolent America versus advantage-taking Japan — its companies putting US rivals out of business even as Washington guaranteed Japan’s defence.
Goncalves was not inventing the basis for an attack on Japan, but plucking it from a moment in history that most have long ago decided to move on from, for many good reasons. Japan’s relative decline is one of those; the emergence of China as the greater threat is another.
Paramount in the moving on, though, has been the narrative corporate America and its investors have deployed for nearly four decades to convince themselves that deindustrialisation was, in the end, a good thing for profits and growth. That narrative may now be primed for rejection and with it the many conventions that have accompanied the steady tightening of US-Japan ties.
Goncalves’s tirade may well prove to be a one-off but the environment in which it emerged is normalising. Nippon Steel, in line with convention, declined to comment on whether Hashimoto owns a dog.
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