Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is in Washington today meeting with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office. Previous remarks made by President Trump during his campaign have fueled concerns about relations between the United State and the Asia-Pacific region. President Trump has stated previously that Japan and China engage in practices that are “not fair” to U.S. companies.
A press conference is scheduled following the meeting at 1:00 p.m. today. After that, President Trump and first lady Melania Trump are set to host the Japanese Prime Minister and his wife, at the president’s south Florida retreat, Mar-a-Largo, where Trump and Abe are planning a round of golf. The White House would not confirm whether or not President Trump would use the $3,800 golf club previously given to him by Abe back in November following his election victory.
The Mar-a-Largo visit marks the first time the president has hosted a foreign leader at his resort while in office. After ethical questions arose about how the Japanese leader’s visit will be funded, a White House spokesperson said that Abe and his wife will stay at the exclusive golf resort “as a personal gift.”
Prime Minister Abe wishes to talk to President Trump about trade and economic issues and is reportedly eager to pursue a closer personal relationship with Trump. Trump previously had called into question Japan’s post World War II security alliance with the United States. In addition, the United States and Japan, the world’s largest and the third-largest economies, were the two linchpins of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Trump scrapped immediately after taking office. Abe had expended considerable domestic political capital on TPP in Japan and he will be looking now to sound out Trump on the possibility of negotiating a future bilateral trade deal between the two countries.
It is expected that Abe, who was the first foreign leader to meet with Donald Trump in Manhattan the week after Trump was elected president, will discuss proposals on how Japanese companies can continue to create hundreds of jobs and invest billions of dollars in the United States.
The stakes are high for Japan because the United States is both its largest export destination and security guarantor. About 50,000 troops are deployed in Japan, the largest American military contingent in Asia.
According to the Japan Business Federation, Japanese companies have directly invested more than $400 billion in building factories and other facilities in the United States, creating about 1.7 million jobs for American workers.
Abe will also discuss a plan called the “Japan-U.S. growth and employment initiative,” which lays out five fields for economic cooperation, including infrastructure; robots and artificial intelligence, and working together in areas such as the Internet and space. Abe told members of his Parliament that he wanted to sell Japan’s bullet train technology to the Untied States so that U.S. states could build high-speed rail links and create jobs by doing so. Japan said it would also help replace as many as 3,000 train and subway cars in the United States.
Japan’s bulging automotive trade surplus will reportedly also be discussed. Trump may press Abe to do more to level the trade imbalance with Japan, but the two leader are unlikely to change the fact that the large cars and trucks made in the United States do not sell in Japan. Only about 13,00 vehicles form U.S. automakers sold in Japan in both 2016 and 2015.
