Bloc and Tackle

It’s a fast elevator to trade tensions

Nothing says early summer in Tokyo like school field trips, hydrangeas … and geopolitical conferences.

For such an event — a geopolitical conference, not a field trip — yours truly rode a fast elevator up 26 floors to the law offices of White & Case in the Marunouchi Trust Tower beside Tokyo Station.

I’m no diplomat, and I don’t play one on TV, but I do rub elbows with a few former and current ones. This is in no official capacity, mind you. I exert less sway on world affairs than Joe Biden’s German Shepherd, Major, even after Major’s term in the White House failed to make it through 2021 due to his penchant for biting guards and other government employees. Despite many voters being able to relate, or perhaps because of that, Major was relocated from the White House in December 2021 and yet came closer to the handles of power than I ever will.

No, much as I would like to sway trade policy and prevent bad guys from taking over the world, I content myself with staying abreast of developments through densely written journals and membership in a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization that keeps heads bowing and hands shaking from Washington to Tokyo for the benefit of US-Japan relations. Don’t blame me for that mouthful. It’s all they’ll allow me to reveal, and even the bowing and shaking bit took some cajoling. “A little fun,” I explained.

Longtime readers might expect me to have attended this summit with my legal eagle friend Ren Sasaki, the cross-border de-disputer, but I went alone. The White & Case conference room is a venue for such confabs, that’s all. As far as I know, none of us in the room was a client.

And that room — oh. State of the art.

Presentations happen in either English or Japanese, with everyone wearing an on-ear real-time interpretation device in case they’re not fluent in whatever is being spoken. A team of bilingual experts located off-site interprets everything spoken into a mic. The voice of the interpreter changes from moment to moment, one woman’s voice to another. I’ve heard only female voices doing the interpretation, each of them excellent.

Even the Q&A gets interpreted in the ear boxes, truly anything into a mic. I once heard a mistaken partial interpretation of a snack bar quip near a mic until the interpreter abruptly cut her voice, apologized, and went silent without explanation. All I heard going into Japanese was something along the lines of “how the hell are we supposed to make a point when—” The end. I wish she’d delivered the rest.

Attending one of these is liking walking into the live video feed of the United Nations.

There I sat in my usual spot in row three, close enough to make eye contact with the panel but deep enough into the crowd to feel the room’s vibe. The topic this day was “The Cold Trade War,” about the rise of China into the economic, and possibly military, crosshairs of the United States and Europe.

On stage sat five experts from America, the EU, Japan, and South Korea, but not China. Dialogue is not really China’s thing. It finds CCP diktat to be more efficient.

“Let’s cut to the chase,” an American economist said early. “China dumps goods worldwide, loss leaders everywhere, taking a page from Amazon’s early days but on a sovereign economic scale. This is not free enterprise, a fair contest, anything like that. These are government-backed entities, if not outright government-controlled entities, whose job is not to turn a profit but to turn the tide.”

“The tide?” pressed our host, for clarification.

“Yes, the tide of free trade. Now that China has muddied the waters, decades of diplomacy are irrelevant. Its ‘cheapo maximo’ maxim started a worldwide race to the depths of protectionism. Once competitors are gone, China will own key industries and start ratcheting prices higher. Old playbook, new player.”

It might have been easy to dismiss this as just one cantankerous economist’s view, except that it matched the one expressed by US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen in Frankfurt last month.

The world has a China problem.