As Japan’s top trade envoy headed to Washington last week for another round of negotiations on tariffs, a separate bipartisan group under the banner of “Japan-China Friendship” concluded a diplomatic visit to Beijing.
Just a week prior, the leader of Japan’s junior ruling coalition party had visited Beijing, where he delivered a letter from Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba to Chinese President Xi Jinping. While the contents of the message remain undisclosed, the discussions reportedly touched on U.S. tariffs as well as other bilateral matters.
Amid China’s outreach to U.S. allies in its trade standoff with Washington, Japan presents a particularly distinctive case.
Its strong allegiance to the United States, paired with a complex and sometimes tense relationship with China—largely rooted in lingering historical grievances from 20th-century wartime events—make its position especially notable.
“Japan and China are neighbors and have deep economic ties, with much that links them,” said Matthew Goodman, director of the Greenberg Center for Geoeconomics at the Council on Foreign Relations. “But at the same time, there are clear boundaries to how closely Japan is willing to align with China.”
While Japan won’t walk away from its alliance with the United States, the linchpin of the Asian country’s diplomacy and security policies, “it’s also true that the tariffs and uncertainty that Trump has created for Japan is really shaking things up in Tokyo,” Goodman said.
Last month, President Donald Trump announced a 24% tariff on Japanese goods in a sweeping plan to levy duties on about 90 countries. The White House has since paused the tariffs but a 10% baseline duty on all countries except China, allowing time for negotiations. Still, Trump’s 25% tax on aluminum, steel and auto exports have gone into effect for Japan.
The tariff moves, as well as Trump’s “America First” agenda, have cast doubts among the Japanese if the United States is still a dependable ally, while China is rallying support from tariff-threatened countries — including Japan.
In Beijing, Japan sees positive signs
When Tetsuo Saito led Japan’s Komeito Party delegation to Beijing in late April, China hinted at difficulty in its tariff dispute with the United States, signaling its willingness to improve ties with Tokyo. An unnamed senior Chinese official said his country was “in trouble” when discussing Trump’s 145% tariff on Chinese products, according to Japanese reports.
Saito’s visit was soon followed by that of the bipartisan delegation of Japan-China Friendship Parliamentarians’ Union. Zhao Leji, Beijing’s top legislator, told the delegation that China’s National People’s Congress would be “willing to carry out various forms of dialogue and exchanges.”
Beijing did not lift a ban on Japan’s seafood imports as the Japanese delegates hoped, but it signaled positive signs on its assessment of the safety of the discharges of treated radioactive wastewater from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Beijing banned Japan’s seafood products in 2023, citing those concerns.
Ties between Tokyo and Beijing have long been rocky. In the past several years, they squabbled not only over the seafood ban but also long-standing territorial disputes over the Senkaku, or Diaoyu, islands in the East China Sea, Beijing’s growing military assertiveness and violence against Japanese nationals in China — an issue complicated by the nations’ uneasy history.
Tokyo’s closer ties with Washington during Joe Biden’s presidency also upset Beijing, which saw it as part of the U.S. strategy to contain China and has lectured Tokyo to “face squarely and reflect on the history of aggression.”
An imperial power in Asia for centuries, China fell behind Japan in the 19th century when Japan began to embrace Western industrialization and grew into a formidable economic and military power. It invaded China in the 1930s and controlled the northeastern territory known as Manchuria. War atrocities, including the Nanking Massacre and the use of chemical and biological weapons and human medical experiments in Manchuria, have left deep scars in China. They have yet to be healed, though Japan’s conservative politicians today still attempt to deny the aggression.
Ishiba, elected Japan’s prime minister in October, has a more neutral view on his country’s wartime history than the late Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his two successors. Weeks after taking office, Ishiba held talks with Xi on the sidelines of a leaders’ summit.
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Chinese scholars, however, see Tokyo’s recent engagements with Beijing as a pragmatic move to hedge against U.S. protectionism and not a long-term strategy for stability with China.
The odds are low for Japan to move into China’s orbit, Goodman said. “They have for a long time had to manage an important but challenging relationship with China,” he said. “And that is, again, a long-standing problem for Japan, going back centuries or millennia.”
Seeking tariff deals and stable ties in the US
While Japan might welcome the friendlier tone from Beijing, it is trying to stabilize Japan-U.S. relations under Trump’s “America First” agenda, and it is hoping to settle the tariff dispute without confronting Washington, with an eye on preventing Beijing from exploiting any fallout in Japan-U.S. relations.
Japan was among the first countries to hold tariff talks with Washington. During the first round in mid-April, Trump inserted himself into the discussions, a sign of the high stakes for the United States to reach a deal with Japan. The Trump administration reportedly pushed for Japan to buy more U.S.-made cars and open its market to U.S. beef, rice and potatoes.
After the second round of negotiation in Washington last week, Ryosei Akazawa, the country’s chief tariff negotiator, said he pushed Japan’s request that the U.S. drop tariffs and was continuing efforts toward an agreement acceptable to both sides. He said Japan’s auto industry was already hurting from the 25% tariff and that he needed to be “thorough but fast.”
Asked about China, Akazawa said only that his country keeps watching the U.S.-China tariff development “with great interest.” He noted Japan’s deep trade ties with China.