The United States has for the first time started purchasing Japanese seafood to provide its military there, a response to China’s ban on such products set after Tokyo released treated water from its crippled Fukushima nuclear plant into the sea.
Revealing the initiative in a Reuters interview on Monday, US Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel said the US should also look more considerably into how it could help offset China’s ban that he said was part of its “economic wars.”
China, which had been the largest buyer of Japanese seafood, says its ban is due to food safety worries.
The UN’s nuclear watchdog vouched for the protection of the water release that started in August from the plant wrecked by a 2011 tsunami. G7 trade ministers on Sunday called for the immediate repeal of bans on Japanese food.
Emanuel said, “It’s going to be a long-term contract between the US armed forces and the fisheries and co-ops here in Japan.”
He said, “The best way we have proven in all the instances to kind of wear out China’s economic coercion is to come to the aid and assistance of the targeted country or industry.”
The first buy involves just shy of a metric ton of scallops, a small fraction of more than 100,000 tons of scallops that Japan exported to mainland China the previous year.
Emanuel said the buys — which will feed troopers in messes and aboard vessels as well as being sold in shops and restaurants on military bases — will grow over time to all types of seafood. The US military had not previously purchased local seafood in Japan, he said.
Washington could also look at its overall fish imports from Japan and China, he said. The US is also in discussions with Japanese authorities to help direct locally caught scallops to US-registered processors.
Emanuel, who was former US President Barack Obama’s White House chief of staff, has in recent months made a string of blunt statements on China, seeking at different issues including its economic policies, opaque decision-making, and treatment of foreign firms.
That has come as top US officials, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, have visited China in a measure to draw a line under strained ties.
Questioned if he thought himself hawkish on China, Emanuel rejected the term and said he was a “realist.”
He said, “I don’t consider it hawkish but just consider it realist and honest. Maybe the honesty is painful, but it’s honest. I’m all for stability, and understanding. That doesn’t mean you’re not honest. They’re not contradictory. One of the ways you establish stability is that you’re able to be honest with each other.”
He said Beijing faced major economic challenges heightened by a leadership intent on turning their backs on international systems.
“The kind of loser in this is the youth of China. You now have a situation where 30 percent of the Chinese youth, one out of three, are unemployed. You have major cities with unfinished housing … you have major municipalities not able to pay city workers. Why? Because China made a political decision to turn their back on a system in which they were benefiting.”
The most current official youth unemployment data from China, published in July before China said it was suspending publication of the numbers, showed it jumping to a record high of 21.3 percent.
Emanuel said that he was also keeping a close watch on how China’s leadership responds to the recent death of former Premier Li Keqiang, a reformist who was sidelined by Chinese President Xi Jinping.
He said, “What’s … interesting to me, that I think is telltale, is how they will be treating his funeral and how they’ll be treating comments about him. I do think that there’s kind of a section of China that sees what kind of policies he was pursuing as kind of the best of China. But that’s up for China to decide.”
