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Akio Toyoda, the automotive magnate, Shohei Ohtani, the baseball prodigy, Monkey D Luffy, the rubber-limbed manga pirate. Three titans who have indisputably conquered America, but with three hats — one red, one blue and one straw — that define the current fragility of Japanese triumph.
The first, most jaw-dropping item of headgear is a bright red Make America Great Again cap: globally recognisable, but an unexpected and revealing choice for the chair of Toyota to wear as he settled in for a morning of motorsports on Sunday.
Toyoda who, a mere three weeks ago, was launching the new Toyota Century with a near-tearful reference to the “spirit and pride of Japan”, sported the Maga hat last weekend in tandem with a matching red Trump-Vance 2024 campaign T-shirt.
To make the geoeconomic fashion statement even more unambiguous, the great figurehead of Japanese industry then took the American ambassador for a spin around the Fuji Speedway track in a Ford pick-up truck. Finely-tuned commercial diplomacy, maybe, but awkward, surely, for a US-based Toyota dealer if asked: “what’s your boss driving these days?”
The background to Toyoda’s obsequious, one-man costume party is tough reality. Japan schmoozed and pledged hard to reduce Trump tariffs on its all-important automotive sector and, despite a trade deal having notionally been done, has yet to uncurl from the supplicant’s crouch. Toyoda’s choice of hat is a warning to others that it is still too soon to take that risk. Howard Lutnick has been keen to remind everyone that Japan “bought down” its tariffs with $550bn of investment pledges; Toyoda knows better than anyone that not a cent has yet been committed.
Toyoda’s hat choice is humiliating but all too necessarily strategic. For all of the symbolic self-abasement, he can get away with it precisely because his company has rewritten the textbook on success in the US. Toyota is where it is because it trounced the American auto industry at its own game. Its US-derived profits, in common with many Japanese companies, are a defining part of the company’s financial story, as are the huge investments into the US that have reshaped so much of corporate Japan. Toyoda’s hat acknowledges that all this, in Trump’s America, is a paid privilege not a right.
Ohtani’s navy-blue LA Dodgers cap, meanwhile, is worn with considerably less anguish or calculation, a crown for the Japanese king of America’s national sport. There are other nuances, of course, but the talented native of rural Iwate wears his Dodgers hat as part of a $700mn, 10-year contract to play for the US team. The 2023 deal was, at the time, the biggest in the history of professional team sports. After Ohtani’s recent season, many will decide that it has already paid for itself.
But while amply reflecting Ohtani’s talent as a sportsman, the scale of the baseball deal is a painful reminder of how stubbornly (by instinct or economic stagnation) Japan itself has failed to keep up with these global indices of reward. Ohtani is unique, and the US outlandish in its remuneration. Some will argue that Japan has done well to avoid such outlandishness. But the sheer distance at which the country now stands from the front lines of global reward systems is in danger of posing real national harm.
Shrinking, ageing Japan is now an economy in critical need of mechanisms and inducements to attract the world’s best — in business, finance and research. It can leave Major League Baseball to pay mad sums for prodigious sports stars. But it must take the extremity of Ohtani’s success and admit that, even with much smaller sums at stake, its best may leave and its global appeal dwindle.
The third and final hat is the straw headgear of Luffy, the hero of the manga-anime phenomenon One Piece and arguably fiction’s biggest global star since Harry Potter. In 2023, his adventures were transformed by a leasing of certain key IP rights into a live-action Netflix series, the second season of which will be aired next year.
Crucially, Netflix has pounced, with far greater enthusiasm than the original Japanese publisher of One Piece, on the vast merchandise opportunities unlocked by its version of the show, and its massive appeal to an international audience. It has started selling a high-end version of the straw hat, much to the dismay of Japanese media. Their concern? Why Japan so regularly misses the opportunity that others (particularly the US) immediately see in Japanese intellectual property. As Toyoda has just learnt, and Ohtani continues to demonstrate, it is time for Japan to throw its hat in the ring.
