Japan should make efforts to prevent its increasing exports to the United States from developing into a political issue, Finance Minister Kiichi Miyazawa said Friday.
Statistics on U.S. trade in goods and services for November suggest Japan and China are playing a central role in inflating the U.S. trade deficit and that Japan's exports to the U.S. may result in friction, he told a news conference.
Miyazawa singled out Japan's steel exports to the U.S. as an area that needs to be watched and said Japan should discuss the matter with the U.S. to avoid conflict.
Meanwhile, trade chief Kaoru Yosano said the same day that Japan's economic recovery is about the only way to rectify the ever-worsening trade imbalance with the U.S.
Attributing the widening trade gap to Japan's dwindling imports, Yosano called for reviving the economy to boost demand and reverse the trend. "We cannot deal with the matter through a sectoral approach," Yosano said in an apparent attempt to prevent Washington from imposing restrictions on steel imports from Japan.
Referring to the growing outcry of the U.S. steel industry against surging Japanese steel exports to the U.S., he said he expects Washington to seek domestic "understanding" of a decline of Japanese exports.