#206 NAFTA's Impact on Japan
By Keiichi Tsunekawa
From the Introduction
A month before the vote in the U.S. Congress on the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, the "Japan card" suddenly became important to both its proponents and opponents. What is perplexing is that each side made a completely opposite assertion about NAFTA's impact on Japan.
On the one hand, in the now famous NAFTA debate with H. Ross Perot on "Larry King Live," Vice President Gore said "if we don't take this deal, you can bet, Japan will try to take this deal." What he was suggesting was that Japan would happily make a free-trade arrangement with Mexico if the United States did not do so first. Opponents of NAFTA, on the other hand, said that Japan would be happier with NAFTA because Japanese firms, just as their U.S. counterparts, could use the cheap labor force in Mexico and at the same time obtain zero-tariff access to the U.S. market.
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