What Japan can teach China about the American art of (trade) war
- How does it end when the world’s biggest economy takes on the second biggest? Ask Tokyo – 30 years on, it is still reeling from the experience
During the 1980s, Japan’s staggering rise into a potential economic superpower, threat and successor to US global hegemony greatly irked the man who would go on to become the 45th American president.
Appearing on The Morton Downey Jr Show in 1989, Trump said of Japan, America’s largest overseas trading partner at the time: “They have systematically sucked the blood out of America. They have got away with murder … We have to tax the hell out of them.”
For years, America had found Japan’s protectionist import strategies vexing. Since the late 1970s, the administration of Jimmy Carter had been looking for ways to open up the Japanese market, and when Ronald Reagan took over in 1981, he sought to do the same and lower America’s trade deficit with it.
Japan back then exported automobiles, auto parts, office machinery and other electronics to the US. Cars comprised the majority of goods – by 1981, 1.8 million Japanese-made cars were sold in the US, while only 4,201 US cars were sold in Japan that same year, according to a 1982 Washington Post report.
