On Political Negotiation: America Pushes to Open Up Japan

Abstract

PERSISTENT BILATERAL TRADE DISPUTES have clouded Japanese-American relations for the past twenty-five years. Despite repeated affirmations about the virtues of a global partnership, legions of commentators suggest that the two governments are on a political collision course, unable to devise adequate mechanisms for joint consultations and stymied over how best to coordinate policies or settle long-standing economic disputes. At a time when the cold war no longer provides a larger inducement for political restraint and as the United States under the Clinton administration moves more threateningly towards results-oriented managed trade, the two countries are headed towards new political frictions which could damage their overall relationship of trust.' On both sides of the Pacific it is agreed that bilateral negotiations on trade-related disagreements are not working especially well. Stripped to their essentials, have negotiations been a riskless strategy of aggressive unilateralism practised by the United States, amounting to little more than a bully-boy tactic of extracting one-way concessions from a fragmented and vulnerable government in defiance of standard economic theory on balance of payments deficits?2 Has American pressure been the most important source for change in Japan's trade policies or are bilateral negotiations more a dubious process of artful brinkmanship, a predictable series of moves and countermoves aimed mostly at forging a