If the United States keeps on “its path, its current path of weakness, they’re going to want to have that anyway, with or without me discussing it,” Trump was quoted as saying.

That same month Trump shocked nuclear policy experts by suggesting at a town hall meeting that the United States might be able to reduce the defence budget by encouraging its allies, especially Japan and South Korea, to build nuclear weapons. When pressed to clarify his comments by the moderator, CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Trump replied: “Wouldn’t you rather in certain sense have Japan have nuclear weapons when North Korea has nuclear weapons?”

Earlier that same week, Trump told Bloomberg’s Mark Halperin that it was important to remain “unpredictable” when dealing with nuclear weapons.

On Monday, Katsuyuki Kawai, a special adviser to Abe, met with William Studeman in Washington, a former director of the National Security Agency who is believed to have close ties with Trump.

Speaking to reporters after the talks, Kawai said he conveyed Abe’s willingness to “swiftly build the highest level of relationship of personal trust with the president-elect.”

“There will be no leaders in the world who the president-elect can count on as much as Prime Minister Abe,” he said.

Abe said on Monday that Japan and the United States shall share in an “appropriate” way the costs of US troops stationed in Japan.

Abe told a session at Japan’s upper house of parliament that as the United States also benefit from stationing its troops in Japan, the costs shall be shared between the two countries.

Japanese Defence Minister Tomomi Inada said last week that she believed Japan was paying enough for the cost of the US forces being stationed here.

Tokyo pays nearly 200 billion yen (US$1.9 billion) a year, or about 75 per cent of the costs, for the 50,000 US troops stationed in Japan, according to local reports.

Additional reporting by The Washington Post and Xinhua