TOKYO — Japan and the United States should avoid confrontation about the steel industry and work together amid competition from China, the world’s top steelmaker, leading prime ministerial candidate Shinjiro Koizumi said Saturday.

Sources told Reuters Friday that a powerful U.S. national security panel reviewing Nippon Steel’s $14.9 billion bid for U.S. Steel faces a September 23 deadline to recommend whether the White House should block the deal.

Koizumi, Japan’s former environment minister, said at a debate Saturday that Japan and the U.S. should not confront each other when it comes to the steel industry but to face together the “shared challenge” coming from China’s steel industry.

“If China, producing cheap steel without renewable or clean energy, floods the global market, it will most adversely affect us, the democratic countries playing by fair market rules,” Koizumi said.

Nippon Steel’s key negotiator on the deal, Vice Chairman Takahiro Mori, said last month that his company and other Japanese steelmakers were urging Tokyo to consider curbing cheap steel imports coming from China to protect the local market.

On Sunday, Nippon Steel and U.S. Steel sent a letter to U.S. President Joe Biden about their deal, as Biden, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump have all opposed the merger.

“We are also in the midst of elections, just like the U.S., and during elections, various ideas may arise. Overreacting to each of these would, in my view, call into question diplomatic judgment,” Koizumi said when asked about the deal.

Sanae Takaichi, Japan’s minister in charge of economic security and another prime ministerial candidate, also defended the deal during the same debate attended by eight other Liberal Democratic Party’s, or LDP, leadership contenders Saturday.

“It appears they are using CFIUS to frame this as an economic security issue,” she said,  referring to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. “However, Japan and the U.S. are allies, and the steel industry is about strengthening our combined resilience.”

The 43-year-old son of former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, the junior Koizumi, is seen as a leading contender in the September 27 race to pick the LDP’s new leader, who will become the next prime minister due to the party’s control of parliament.

Koizumi said Saturday that he would seek a dialog with the North Korean leadership to resolve the issue over the abduction of Japanese citizens kidnapped by North Korean agents in the 1970s and 1980s. The purported primary goal was to train North Korean agents to impersonate Japanese people.

“We want to explore new opportunities for dialog between people of the same generation, without being bound by conventional approaches, and without preconditions,” Koizumi said.

After admitting in 2002 that it had abducted 13 Japanese, North Korea apologized and allowed five to return home. It said eight others had died and denied that an additional four entered its territory. It promised to reinvestigate but has never announced the results.

Japan says North Korea has refused to send the others home because of concern that they might reveal inconvenient information about the country.
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