What Japan Can Teach the US in an Age of Boycotts

The country wanted to do everything itself and largely still does.

- Leo Lewis

Imagine you are in Tokyo, profoundly unsettled by the newsflow from the White House, up for a non-violent anti-American protest and considering a stint as what US President Donald Trump would label a "radical left lunatic". You would boycott Tesla, obviously, and stick it to the man.

Provocative, as far as it goes. But is there much sacrifice in not buying a car you weren't buying anyway? A proper radical left lunatic (RLL) will have noticed bottles of Jack Daniel's whiskey being pulled from Canadian store shelves and concluded that a grander commercial blow to the US was out there for the (not) taking.

So how to land that blow? About a month ago, in an indelibly inked call to mass action, a small handful of Coca-Cola vending machines in Tokyo's Shibuya district were defaced with the word "boycott". Nothing, so far, seems to have come of the campaign, beyond an alluring thought experiment.

However unlikely a boycott by an average Japanese consumer of the US may be, a hypothetical feasibility test is hugely illuminating. It serves not just to show the relative positions of the two economies today, but as a reminder of how expertly Japan has played the tariff and non-tariff game in the past and a hint at the ideological direction that Mr Trump and his entourage may now be striving for.