When Japan joined a dozen other Asia-Pacific countries in talks to form an ultraliberal regional trade zone earlier this year, Shinzo Abe, the prime minister, described the move as a crucial step toward reinvigorating the Japanese economy.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership, he said, would boost growth by improving access to foreign markets for Japanese manufacturers and forcing coddled local industries to become more competitive. In an interview with the Financial Times this month, he reiterated that joining TPP would be “in Japan’s national interest”.
But Toshio Yamada is not buying it.
“Why should Japan take its own underpants off?” the parliamentarian from rural Toyama prefecture said last week, after a senior Japanese negotiator suggested that Tokyo might have to make concessions over a set of highly-protected agricultural products.
Mr Abe had previously called the items, including rice, “sacred territory”, suggesting that they would be exempt from the tariff elimination that is at the heart of the TPP.