Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s wooing of President Trump seemed to get Japan little as the United States announced actions on trade.
TOKYO — For Japan, the hits just keep on coming.
Only last week, Tokyo was scrambling to recover after being caught flat-footed by President Trump’s abrupt acceptance of an invitation to meet Kim Jong-un personally to discuss North Korea’s nuclear program.
On Friday, officials in Japan awoke to the news that it was the largest American ally to be left off a list of countries temporarily exempted from stiff tariffs on steel and aluminum imports by the Trump administration.
The omission of Japan, the largest foreign supplier to be so excluded, was especially pointed. Australia, Brazil, Mexico and even South Korea, which is engaged with the United States in tense renegotiations of a free-trade pact, appeared on the list.
The move also seemed a personal snub of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who has courted Mr. Trump through rounds of golf, frequent telephone calls and lavish steak meals.
“It’s really kind of almost tragicomic,” said Koichi Nakano, a political scientist at Sophia University in Tokyo and frequent critic of the Japanese leader. “Abe was being really sycophantic in trying to please Trump, and at a certain point, quite recently, he was talked about as the closest friend that Trump has. And it all turns out that that wasn’t good for anything when it comes to furthering the national interests of Japan.”
To be sure, Mr. Abe is not the first American ally to be so spurned. Theresa May of Britain, Justin Trudeau of Canada and Angela Merkel of Germany have all had turns at being Mr. Trump’s slighted friend.
Japan could yet win an exemption from the new tariffs. Mr. Trump’s announcement offered a path for countries left off the initial list to “discuss with the United States alternative ways to address the threatened impairment of the national security caused by imports of steel articles.” This week, Japan’s trade minister, Hiroshige Seko, told reporters there was a “high chance” that some of its steel and aluminum products would be exempted.
But for anyone who has been paying attention, there have been hints all along that in matters of trade, Tokyo should regard Mr. Trump as much “frenemy” as friend.
During the presidential campaign, he seemed to harbor three-decades-old perceptions of Japan, chastising it for “crushing” the United States in trade, invoking the specter of the 1980s and the height of the trade wars between the two countries. After he was elected, he threatened to impose a “big border tax” on Toyota if it built a new auto plant in Mexico.
In niggling comments during a visit to Tokyo last fall, Mr.
