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Japan’s trade minister is heading to Washington in a last-minute attempt to seek tariff exemptions after President Donald Trump openly questioned a long-standing security pact between the US and one of its closest allies.
Yoji Muto, minister of economy, trade and industry, is scheduled to meet his American counterpart Howard Lutnick on Monday, just two days before the US is set to impose a 25 per cent tariff on all steel and aluminium imports.
People close to the commerce secretary have described Lutnick as favouring the use of tariffs to convince foreign governments to adopt more US-friendly policies.
The trip comes after Trump on Thursday said while the US had a great relationship with Japan, “we have an interesting deal with Japan that we have to protect them, but they don’t have to protect us”.
In response, Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba told parliament on Friday that the security treaty was reciprocal. Japan hosts more than a dozen US bases and roughly 60,000 US military personnel under a mutual defence pact signed by Republican president Dwight Eisenhower in 1960.
Ishiba is also overseeing a rapid expansion of military spending towards a target of 2 per cent of GDP.
The trade minister is expected to discuss exemptions from the metals tariffs, as well as a reprieve from a possible 25 per cent levy on car imports, which Trump threatened in February could come as soon as April.
Automobile duties would hurt Japan’s big carmakers, which directly export to the US and have complex production networks that rely on the free movement of parts between the US, Mexico and Canada. Cars were Japan’s biggest export last year, with roughly a third bound for the US.
The on-off nature of Trump’s tariff threats has triggered market volatility, with Japan’s exporter-heavy Nikkei 225 stock index falling more than 2 per cent on Friday.
As he departed Tokyo on Sunday, Muto told reporters that he would use his first meeting with Lutnick to “build human relations” and offer suggestions that were “win-win for both the US and Japanese economies”, but did not elaborate.
His visit was announced last week amid rising consternation in Japan over whether its long-standing friendship with the US would protect it from a president who has pointed to the existence of trade deficits with other countries as evidence of unfairness.
The US trade deficit in goods with Japan was the seventh largest by country, at $68.5bn, last year, according to the US Bureau of Economic Analysis. But Japan was also the largest provider of foreign direct investment to the US in terms of ultimate beneficial owner, with $783.3bn in 2023.
Tokyo’s concerns also include accusations of currency manipulation. Trump last Monday cited Japan and China as countries that had been reducing the value of their currency in a way that was unfair to the US.
In response, former Bank of Japan governor Haruhiko Kuroda noted that the country had undertaken huge efforts last year to prop up the falling yen and that current monetary policy, which has been focused on raising interest rates, was not aimed at cheapening the yen.
“If there’s any misunderstanding on that point, it needs to be addressed,” he said on Friday in his first televised interview since stepping down as governor in April 2023.
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