Japan’s 1994 rejection of US import targets marked a turning point in Asian-American relations.

Evidence

Across a wide range of issues, Japanese and other Asian leaders learned to say no to their American counterparts, expressed at times in polite Asian versions of “buzz off.” The symbolic turning point in Asian-American relations was perhaps what one senior Japanese official termed the “first big train wreck” in U.S.-Japanese relations, which occurred in February 1994, when Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa firmly rejected President Clinton’s demand for numerical targets for Japanese imports of American manufactured goods. “We could not have imagined something like this happening even a year ago,” commented another Japanese official. A year later Japan’s foreign minister underlined this change stating that in an era of economic competition among nations and regions, Japan’s national interest was more important than its “mere identity” as a member of the West. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 608

Categorization

• XREF: The explicit statement that national interest outweighs ‘mere identity’ as Western-aligned member echoes themes from the reader’s notes on how states trade identity alignment for realpolitik interests.