TOKYO \u2014 Japan\u2019s prime minister, a man who promised voters he would turn Japan back into a \u201cbeautiful country,\u201d is now doing his utmost to Make America Great Again.
Shinzo Abe is set to arrive in Washington on Friday for his first official summit with President Trump, and he will arrive armed with proposals on how Japanese companies will create hundreds of thousands of jobs and invest hundreds of billions of dollars in the United States.
Abe is clearly trying to get on the businessman president\u2019s good side, but he will try to do so while also \u201ccorrecting\u201d Trump\u2019s \u201cmisunderstandings\u201d about Japan\u2019s trading practices. Trump has said that Japan and China engage in practices that are \u201cnot fair\u201d to U. S. companies, particularly U. S. automakers.
\u201cI will object where I should object,\u201d Abe said in the parliament last week, when asked about Trump\u2019s remarks. \u201cI\u2019d like to clearly explain that it\u2019s not that one side is benefiting but that both sides are benefiting. It\u2019s a win-win situation.\u201d
Abe has wasted no time in currying favor with Trump, becoming the first foreign leader to meet with him after his election when Abe visited Trump Tower in Manhattan the week after Trump\u2019s victory. He had been trying to see Trump within a week of his inauguration, too, but British Prime Minister Theresa May beat him to hold the first summit.
\u201cAbe seems to be playing this as smart as he can,\u201d said Brad Glosserman, a Japan expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies\u2019 Pacific Forum in Hawaii. \u201cIt\u2019s important for him to build a rapport with Trump \u2014 Trump likes strong nationalist leaders, and Abe is a strong nationalist leader \u2014 and personalize the institutionalized relationship.\u201d
Japan is nervous about its post-World War II security alliance with the United States \u2014 Trump had called it into question \u2014 but also about economic relations. The United States and Japan, the world\u2019s largest and third-largest economies, were the two linchpins of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, which Trump scrapped immediately upon taking office.
[ Trump phone calls signal a new transactional approach to allies and neighbors ]
Abe will take a plan called the \u201cJapan-U. S. growth and employment initiative\u201d with him to Washington, laying out five fields for economic cooperation, including infrastructure; robots and artificial intelligence; and working together in areas such as the Internet and space.
With a proposed $450\u00a0billion in infrastructure investments in the United States, Japan would generate 700,000 jobs, the paper claims, according to reports in the Japanese media. The prime minister\u2019s office declined to confirm them.
But it is not clear how many of the jobs Abe will offer will actually be new jobs.
The infrastructure component would include high-speed rail projects in the Northeast, as well as in Texas and California. Japan would also help replace as many as 3,000 train and subway cars in the United States, the document said.
But Japan is already trying to sell Maryland a superfast \u201cmaglev\u201d train between Baltimore and Washington and is involved in bullet train projects in Texas and California.
The document said Japan would \u201cfurther cooperate\u201d in highly efficient gas-fired power generation and the latest compact nuclear-power generation systems, according to the Yomiuri Shimbun, a conservative newspaper with close ties to the prime minister.
[ Trump TPP move seen as win for China, but Beijing isn\u2019t celebrating ]
Abe met with Akio Toyoda, the chief executive of Toyota Motor, last week to prepare for the summit, according to local reports.
After Trump took to Twitter to criticize Toyota\u2019s plan to build a plant in Mexico to manufacture Corollas for the U. S. market, Toyota re-announced plans to invest $600\u00a0million and add 400 jobs to its plant in Indiana, the home state of Vice President Pence.
Separately, Japan\u2019s Government Pension Investment Fund (GPIF), the world\u2019s largest with $1.2\u00a0trillion in assets, is preparing to invest $150\u00a0billion in the United States. It will buy debt issued by U. S. companies, the Nikkei business newspaper reported.
The GPIF had long concentrated its investments in Japanese government bonds but, under Abe\u2019s orders, has been buying up Japanese stocks over the past three years.
Norihiro Takahashi, president of the fund, denied that the latest plan had been orchestrated by Abe\u2019s government, saying investments were made according to the returns they could earn.
[ Japanese aren\u2019t so sure about Donald Trump, but they love Ivanka ]
Polls have shown that most Japanese expect relations with the United States to worsen under Trump. One, conducted by the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper the day after the inauguration, found that 56\u00a0percent thought it would worsen, while 29\u00a0percent thought it would remain the same.
Remarks like those Trump made to pharmaceutical executives last week are fueling concerns about relations with the United States under its new president.
\u201cYou look at what China\u2019s doing, you look at what Japan has done over the years,\u201d Trump told the meeting. \u201cThey play the money market, they play the devaluation market, and we sit there like a bunch of dummies.\u201d
Financial and governmental authorities in Japan immediately responded that their efforts have been aimed at pulling Japan out of two decades of deflation, not artificially devaluing the yen.
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