TOKYO, Japan—After winning a public mandate in the past two general elections, Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe has become more forthcoming in lambasting the media, not only committing the ‘verbal’ but, going beyond, direct intervention, clearly encouraged by Donald Trump’s and China’s Xi Jinping’s media attacks.
On Nov. 13, NHK, the country’s national broadcasting station during a 12:00 noon news program, live-broadcast the joint news conference of Abe and Mike Pence, in which the U.S. vice president’s comments in part was translated by a simultaneous interpreter broadcast by NHK as ‘FTA (free trade agreement).’
In a news program aired after 1:00 p.m., however, NHK moved a correction that what the interpreter translated ‘a bilateral trade agreement’ as FTA was an error and that it should have been
‘a bilateral trade agreement (minus ‘free’). NHK in later news programs then emphasized Pence’s reference to the proposed agreement as ‘TAG (trade agreement in goods)’ that Pence agreed with Abe to start negotiating next year. NHK also said in the news shows that Pence and Abe affirmed that while the two countries are negotiating a trade agreement, the United States won’t raise tariffs on Japanese autos.
Deputy cabinet secretary Yasutoshi Nishimura raised the interpreter’s translation error after the Pence-Abe joint news conference that Pence did not use the word FTA, which some Japanese media said was an affirmation of his direct intervention to NHK to change the language.
On his arrival in Japan Nov. 12, Pence tweeted that in his one-on-one with Abe, he would hold negotiations for a free-trade agreement. During Oct. 29 House of Representatives plenary session, Abe said he did not expect a trade accord with the United States would embrace broadly to include services and goods and other areas. But during joint presser with Abe, Pence said an agreement with Japan would include services.
What this semantics difference shows is that the Abe cabinet, which to the public may look like a team of competent politicians, on the contrary depends closely to the Japanese bureaucracy. Top of the five seats of prime minister’s special advisor is a Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport official. Nishimura, who reports to cabinet secretary Yoshihide Suga, comes from the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.
Japanese media said it was Abe who concocted the word TAG. He had plotted to impress Japanese voters that he had devised a new trade regime that won’t force Japan to yield to U.S. pressure, yet benefits the two countries. ‘TAG is meant to blindfold the Japanese public from reality,’ one report said.
–Toshio Aritake