Transcript: Japan and the US talk tariffs

This is an audio transcript of the FT News Briefing podcast episode: ‘Japan and the US talk tariffs’

Marc Filippino
Good morning from the Financial Times. Today is Friday, April 18th, and this is your FT News Briefing.

The US’s trade war is cooling energy co-operation. And Japan’s trade minister got a first-hand look at Donald Trump’s negotiating tactics.

Leo Lewis
While he was in the air, flying from Tokyo to Washington, Trump went on Truth Social and said that he would be joining the meeting.

Marc Filippino
Plus, the search for alien life got a major boost this week. I’m Marc Filippino, and here’s the news you need to start your day.

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China has stopped buying liquefied natural gas from the US. For more than 10 weeks now, there haven’t been any shipments between the two countries, and it’s a signal that Trump’s trade war has spilled over into the energy sector. China has imposed a 49 per cent tariff on US gas, which makes the stuff just too expensive for most Chinese buyers. The freeze in imports raises a lot of questions about a multibillion-dollar expansion of gas facilities in the US and Mexico. Chinese companies now want to renegotiate their contracts.

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Japan’s top trade negotiator was in Washington this week. Tokyo is the first major capital to kick-start tariff negotiations with the Trump administration. Which makes Japan a bit of a guinea pig, as my colleague Leo Lewis has said. He’s here with me now. Leo, get me up to speed here on the position that Japan was in going into these talks.

Leo Lewis
So, when this all started, Japan thought that it was in perhaps a decent position with the US. It’s the biggest provider of foreign direct investment into the US. It’s got a lot of its big companies, Toyota and so on, have got factories in the US that they’ve invested in over years. And of course, there’s a very long-standing security treaty, which makes Japan basically America’s closest ally in Asia. That said, when the so-called reciprocal tariffs were announced, Japan found itself on the business end of a 24 per cent so-called reciprocal tariff. That’s on top of already very substantial 25 per cent tariffs on automobile imports, steel and aluminium. And so it went in very hard trying to convince the US that it should be first in line to negotiate with Washington.

Marc Filippino
And what’s the reaction been to these tariffs from people in Japan?

Leo Lewis
Yeah, so it’s a very complicated situation for the Prime Minister, Shigeru Ishiba. He faces a public that, when polled, have said, well, actually, Japan should be enacting countermeasures. At the same time, Japan knows exactly how vulnerable it is to a really big change in the global order. It needs America for its security. It needs America pushing for a global rules-based trading system. And so in a way, it knows that the way that Trump goes about negotiations, he’s going to put Japan in a position of having to make some pretty big concessions probably.

Marc Filippino
So, it was under those conditions that negotiators went into the White House this week. What came out of the meeting?

Leo Lewis
So the main decision was really to continue talking. The Trump side hasn’t laid out exactly what their ask is. They’ve made it clear that they don’t like the idea of big trade deficits with other countries, like Japan, but they haven’t exactly clarified what it is that they think that would completely address that, and what it is that they really want. So Japan was going into this just as curious as everyone else. This was exploratory as much as it was going there with a fixed agenda of what Japan might be able to offer. It’s pretty clear that there was some discussion about Japanese defence spending. There does seem to have been discussion on some of the issues that we had been told to expect would come up, namely American agricultural exports to Japan and Japanese investment.

Marc Filippino
So Leo, you mentioned that Japan’s sort of one of the first countries to come to the negotiation table with Trump’s team. What lessons can other countries learn from its experience?

Leo Lewis
Well, the big lesson is that you should expect the unexpected, and that came in really pretty spectacular style in these meetings. So Ryosei Akazawa, the leader of the Japanese delegation, had gone there expecting to sit down with Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, and with Jamieson Greer, the US trade representative, which indeed he did. But while he was in the air, flying from Tokyo to Washington, Trump went on Truth Social and said that he would be joining the meeting.

That was not something that Japan knew was coming nor had expected. The slightly surprising thing really is that the Japanese negotiator, he’s not a great figure of Japan. He’s certainly not the prime minister or even the finance minister, and yet Trump wanted to be in the room with him. And that I think has been interpreted a number of ways, including the fact that, you know, the Trump camp for all of its hard talk does actually want deals to be done. And I think that was the message that Japan’s taken out of this and possibly what a lot of other countries could probably take out of it as well.

Marc Filippino
Leo Lewis is the FT’s Tokyo bureau chief.

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The European Central Bank cut its benchmark interest rate yesterday by a quarter point. It’s now down to 2.25 per cent. The decision to cut was unanimous. Central bankers are worried about slowing economic growth, plus all the uncertainty surrounding Trump’s tariff plans. And speaking of the US President, Trump lashed out at Federal Reserve chair Jay Powell on Thursday for not lowering US interest rates quicker.

Donald Trump voice clip
I don’t think he’s doing the job. He’s too late, always too late. Little slow, and I’m not happy with him. I let him know it, and if I want him out, he’ll be out of there real fast, believe me.

Marc Filippino
The Fed has, so far, kept interest rates on hold this year. Powell said on Wednesday that tariffs will make it difficult for the Fed to hit its sweet spot of low inflation and high employment.

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ET, get your phone ready, because it’s looking more and more like we’re not alone in the universe. Astronomers say they’ve found signs of life on a planet more than 100 light years away. Here to give me the scoop is my colleague Clive Cookson, he covers other worlds for the FT. Hey, Clive.

Clive Cookson
Hi, Marc.

Marc Filippino
So give me details of this latest discovery. What did scientists find?

Clive Cookson
This group of astronomers used the new James Webb Space Telescope to examine the atmosphere of a distant planet. It’s called K2-18b, and it’s 124 light years from Earth, and that is such a long, long way. It’s about a million, million, million kilometres. What they were looking for was molecules in the atmosphere that would be signs of biology, molecules that could only be produced by living organisms. And they found them.

Marc Filippino
Tell me what’s so special about this planet, K2-18b, aside from a name that’s straight out of Star Wars (laughs).

Clive Cookson
Nothing like it exists in our solar system. It’s about eight times the mass of Earth. And it is believed to be covered in a liquid water, one huge ocean. And it’s got a rich atmosphere, which is composed mainly of hydrogen. The astronomers have given a name to it, for this type of planet called Hycean, which stands for hydrogen, allying with ocean. And a Hycean world has very different chemical properties, and what the astronomers think they’ve found is that it contains four organic carbon-containing molecules which they say could not be produced by any non-biological process. In other words, they must have been produced by life.

Marc Filippino
So Clive, we’re talking molecules here. What about intelligent aliens? Like are we gonna find Chewbacca on this planet?

Clive Cookson
We won’t. Well, I suppose we could find a submarine, a marine Chewbacca (laughter), because the important thing to remember, Marc, is this is an ocean planet. And it’s a bit like Earth’s early oceans, say, three billion years ago. But, it’s impossible to say whether within that ocean, there might be a complicated food chain with predators and all sorts of weird marine creatures. But the point is that as far as we can speculate, if they exist, they’ve stayed within the water.

Marc Filippino
So Clive, aside from now putting an image of submarine Chewbacca in my head, which seems awesome, where does the search for alien life go from here?

Clive Cookson
The search for alien life has never been more active in my lifetime. It’s proceeding on several fronts. One is a bit like this, looking at the atmospheres of distant planets and with better and better telescopes and instruments, there are more and more observations coming in. So we might find other planets that have signatures of biology. Then Jupiter has some icy moons, and beneath the ice there are supposed to be oceans. And those oceans might be the closest thing we have in the solar system to the ocean world that we’ve been talking about on K2-18b, and that’s just signs of life. Then the other possibility is that we’ll detect a signal from extraterrestrial intelligence, either radio or laser or using some exotic technology. That’s another sort of search. But one of these I am confident will produce positive results, let’s say by 2060.

Marc Filippino
Clive Cookson is the FT’s senior science writer. Thanks so much, Clive.

Clive Cookson
Thank you, Marc.

Marc Filippino
You can read more on all these stories for free when you click the links in our show notes. This has been your daily FT News Briefing. Check back next week for the latest business news.

The FT News Briefing is produced by Sonja Hutson, Fiona Symon, Lulu Smyth, Ethan Plotkin, Kasia Broussalian and me, Marc Filippino. Our engineer is Joseph Salcedo. We had help this week from Edwin Lane, Katya Kumkova and Michela Tindera. Additional help from Michael Lello, Peter Barber, David da Silva and Gavin Kallmann. Our executive producer is Topher Forhecz. Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio, and our theme song is by Metaphor Music.