ABSTRACT
In the fall of 2000, one industry after another petitioned Tokyo to use “safeguard clauses” and other legal techniques to restrict mushrooming imports from China and other Asian countries. In the end, the agricultural lobby got its temporary safeguard protection, but no one else did. The textile industry was internally divided, with small domestic producers demanding protection but larger multinationals, as well as retailers, opposing it. Some of the farm products were cultivated on behalf of Japanese trading companies, using Japanese seeds and spores. While these political developments are very welcome, they have yet to translate into greater openness on the ground. In Germany and the United States, by contrast, the trade-to-GDP ratios more than doubled in recent decades, in the US case from 9 percent to 26 percent. At times in the late 1980s and again in the mid-1990s, imports rose quickly for a while, and some analysts rushed to claim that past patterns had been broken.
