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For the leader of a 177-year-old company, there’s no hard and fast way to stop people from comparing you to a mafia boss. A common trick, however, is to avoid holding a 106-minute press conference in which you threaten to destroy your enemy completely, ransack his house and take his dog.
But Convention 2025 went into disarray, confused and fearful of the worst possible upheaval to come. Is 21st century Japan worse than evil? Is the main villain? Is it a brainwasher? You may not think so, but the country needs to develop a discourse where the CEOs of American companies do not hesitate to speak.
Lorenzo Goncalves, chief executive of US steelmaker Cleveland-Cliffs, was ready for an unusually bada bing on dog ownership. Eiji Hashimoto, the CEO of Nippon Steel, was so convinced he could take everything (cars, houses, every last penny) that he began researching the rules for shipping dogs from Japan to America, he told reporters.
The vituperation developed from there. This week’s press release – ostensibly called for clarification. Cleveland-Cliffs plans to buy US Steel Now that President Joe Biden has blocked Nippon’s bid on national security grounds—it had a trick beyond the usual M&A conflict. But he comfortably settled into the mood of the week before Donald Trump was sworn in.
Nippon Steel accused Goncalves of campaigning to derail the merger with US Steel and using tactics “more befitting of a mafia boss than the CEO of a publicly traded company.” Goncalves, who said he would take legal action against Hashimoto’s in the U.S., fired back with a sly and serious attack on Japan itself. In it, he repeatedly warned against the folly of interrupting Trump and at one point held up an American flag.
“China is bad. China is evil. China is horrible. Japan is worse,” he said. “You haven’t learned anything since 1945. You haven’t learned how good we are, how kind we are. Stop sucking our blood.”
It was all really sad. Many have decided to dismiss Goncalves’s performance as uniquely flawed, and the attack on Japan as a cynical, anti-aggressor.
A wise take might be to look at the composition, the origin and the actual beating at the convention, even if it is ugly. Trump’s rise and return has been framed by some as his and his supporters’ rejection of ideas, institutions, behaviors, and interpretations that seem long-term innocuous. It is an area where Japan has to be careful, but at least now it has an understanding of where the attack might come from.
At one key moment, Goncalves advised the audience to watch a YouTube video of Trump’s expletives. When interviewed by Larry King in 1987. In it, the incoming president insults Japan as a “money machine” to which the US has been very friendly and generous. He was tired, he said, “of seeing other countries rip off the United States.”
Trump was certainly not alone in that interpretation: a typical pessimistic note at the time was struck by the slide of the US economy, just as Japan’s bubble was expanding and US supremacy seemed in doubt. Profits for Japanese makers of steel, electronics, cars and motorcycles have come at the expense of American rivals.
Trump may have been too busy consuming the many scathing analyzes published at the time that undermined US-Japan relations with Japan’s industrial policy warnings and American anxiety over industrialization. But the feeling of universal economic conflict was in the ether. Philanthropic America vs. Japan Benefit – As Washington guarantees Japan’s defense, its companies put American rivals out of business.
Goncalves was not inventing the basis for an attack on Japan, but he was seizing from a moment in history that many had long ago decided to move on to, for many good reasons. Japan’s relative decline is one of them; The biggest threat is the rise of China.
Central to the process, however, was the narrative of corporate America, and its capitalists spent four decades convincing themselves that deindustrialization was ultimately good for profits and growth. That narrative can now be avoided and the many agreements that have come with the constant straining of US-Japan relations can be made.
Goncalves’ tirade may have been a one-off, but the environment it created is routine. Nippon Steel, in keeping with convention, declined to comment on whether Hashimoto owned a dog.
