What seems to have been reverberating as a domestic political affair haunting Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is screaming to ripple over to his Mar-a-Lago golf plays with Donald Trump and could give Trump a windfall opportunity to make inordinate demands to sell American autos in Japan.
Tadao Yanase, who served as Abe’s policy secretary late 2012-August 2015 and currently the international affairs vice minister of economy, trade and industry (METI) , the second highest METI administrative post, could become a game changer of Japan’s auto trade policy that to date has been that the country’s market is fully open to imports based on most-favored nation status to all exporting nations including the United States.
Yanase, who worked as deputy general manager of the METI auto division in the 1990s, is under public scrutiny for his comments to Japanese media, presumably defending Abe, that ‘as far as my memory, I did not meet’ officials of the Ehime Prefecture and Imabari City offices – contradicting to the memoranda of the city officials meeting with Yanase April 2, 2015 at the prime minister’s official residence.
At an April 12 news conference, Ehime Gov. Tokihiro Nakamura confirmed the memoranda and the content as existing and accurate, according to Japanese media reports.
The memoranda, according to the reports, recorded that Yanase as saying that a veterinarian university building project applied by Kake Gakuen group (http://www.kake.ac.jp/about/index.html) was what Abe had to approve, not the government administrative branch, meaning that Abe and his wife Akie were directly involved in the project, in possible violation of laws and politicians’ ethics.
The public believes Ehime and Imabari, not surprisingly, so Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party is preparing to summon Yanase as witness to the Diet (parliament). And whatever Yanase has to explain in Diet testimony, public doubts about him won’t go away as he repeatedly said, ‘I do not remember’ about the meeting with Ehime and Imabari officials in his Diet testimony in July 2017 – when the Kakei issue had surfaced.
Impacts auto trade?
As deputy general manager of the METI auto division in the mid-1990s, Yanase was one of the henchmen who drafted Japan-U.S. bilateral texts while he had been with the division that stated that Japan would relax regulations on motor vehicle inspections, take proactive steps to encourage Japanese dealerships to sell imports, and automakers would purchase foreign auto parts, among many policy measures.
European automakers benefited most from those measures with their share of the overall Japanese auto market now topping 10 percent but Detroit makers’ shares contracted miserably, prompting them to abandon Japan save portions of Fiat-Chrysler.
If auto trade surfaces as a topic of the Trump-Abe one-on-one later in April and if historical protocols are practiced, Yanase would be the key Japanese administrative representative to talk with Trump administration counterparts to assist METI minister Hiroshige Seko, who’s likely to meet USTR Robert Lighthizer.
Making little headway in his attempt to win Chinese concessions on the bilateral tariff-raising spat, gossips swirling around in Tokyo is that the Trump administration may ask Abe to be good house for a smooth U.S. re-entry into the Trans-Pacific Partnership 11 framework, the Asia-Pacific regional free trade framework that omits China, India and the United States and signed in March (but not ratified yet) to avoid being isolated in the region.