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For the head of a 177-year-old publicly traded company, there’s no hard and fast way to stop people from comparing you to a mob boss. However, one conventional tactic was to avoid holding a 106-minute press conference in which you threaten to completely destroy your enemy, take over his house and take his dog.
But the convention entered 2025 scarred, confused and cowering in the face of an even worse beating to come. Is 21st century Japan worse than evil? Is it the main villain? Is it a brainwashing bloodsucker? It may not seem like it, but the country should prepare itself for a discourse in which the CEOs of American companies will not mind saying that it is.
As for owning a dog, Lourenco Goncalves, CEO of American steelmaker Cleveland-Cliffs, was ready with a calculatedly unconventional bada bingo. So confident is he that he can take everything (the car, the house, the last dime) from Eiji Hashimoto, the CEO of Nippon Steel, that he told reporters that he has already begun questioning the rules surrounding the export of dogs from Japan to the US.
Vituperation built from there. This week’s press conference — supposedly called to explain Cleveland-Cliffs plans to buy US Steel now President Joe Biden blocked Nippon’s bid on national security grounds — he had a malice that extended far beyond a conventional M&A conflict. It fit comfortably, however, with the mood of the week before Donald Trump was sworn in again.
Nippon Steel filed a lawsuit accusing Goncalves of campaigning to prevent its merger with US Steel and of using tactics “more befitting a mob boss than a stock company CEO.” Goncalves, who said he would take legal action against Hashimoto in the US over the allegations, turned his retort into a sharp, blistering attack on Japan itself. In it, he repeatedly warned about the stupidity of crossing Trump and at one point grabbed the American flag.
“China is bad. China is evil. China is terrible. But Japan is worse,” he said, adding: “You haven’t learned anything since 1945. You haven’t learned how good we are, how merciful we are.” He added: “Stop sucking our blood.”
All this was very disturbing indeed. Many will choose to dismiss Goncalves’ performance as uniquely deranged, and the attack on Japan as a rabid, counterfactual hack.
It might be wiser to see it, ugly as it is, for its coherence, its origin, and for the very precise blow it strikes at convention. The rise and return of Trump has been described by some as a valid series of rejections, by him and his supporters, of ideas, institutions, behaviors and interpretations that have long seemed invulnerable. It’s an environment Japan needs to be wary of, but at least now it has a sense of where the attack might come from.
At one key moment, Goncalves recommended his audience watch a YouTube video exposing Trump interviewed by Larry King in 1987. In it, the future president denounced Japan as a “money machine” to which the US was too accommodating and generous. He was tired, he said, “of watching other countries rip off the United States.”
Trump was certainly not alone in this interpretation: the then usual note of despair over America’s economic stumbling occurred at the very moment when the Japanese bubble was expanding and American supremacy seemed really questionable. Gains by Japanese steel, electronics, car and motorcycle manufacturers have undeniably come at the expense of American rivals.
Trump may have been too busy to devour the many serious analyzes published at the time that dissected the US-Japan relationship with warnings against Japanese industrial policy and nervousness about American deindustrialization. But the sense of an all-out economic conflict was in the air. A benevolent America versus a preemptive Japan — its companies that put American competitors out of business even as Washington guaranteed Japan’s defense.
Goncalves did not invent the basis for attacking Japan, but took it from a moment in history that most had long since decided to move on from, for many good reasons. Japan’s relative decline is one of those; the emergence of China as a greater threat is another.
Most important to progress, however, was the narrative that corporate America and its investors used for nearly four decades to convince themselves that deindustrialization was, in the end, a good thing for profits and growth. That narrative may now be ready to be discarded, and with it many of the conventions that accompanied the steady tightening of US-Japanese ties.
Goncalves’ tirade may prove to be a one-off, but the environment in which it appeared is normalizing. Nippon Steel, in keeping with convention, declined to comment on whether Hashimoto owns a dog.
