Looking back as his nearly three-year stint as U.S. ambassador to Japan wraps up this month, Rahm Emanuel doesn’t have a single thing to point to as his top accomplishment.
That’s because whittling that list down would be a difficult task.
As envoy to the United States’ key partner in Asia, the former congressman, White House chief of staff and Chicago mayor oversaw arguably the most consequential shift in the bilateral alliance in decades. From Japan’s plan to double defense spending — a move long urged by Washington — to an agreement to allow U.S. Navy ships to be repaired in Japan, Emanuel helped nudge and sometimes spearhead a number of moves to upgrade ties.
But he professes that the biggest thing he has brought to the U.S.-Japan relationship might be a fresh injection of vitality.
“It's no one particular thing, except for a level of energy and intensity of modernizing and reforming the alliance so it's better prepared to be responsive to both the opportunities and the challenges,” Emanuel says during a recent interview at the ambassador’s residence in Tokyo.
It has been this energy that Emanuel channeled to help shepherd dramatic shifts in the countries’ bilateral alliance.
You can see it, he says, in the two allies’ growing economic and cultural ties. Emanuel says that the energy is visible in the increasingly close trilateral and multilateral security relationships and in the growing lack of daylight between Washington and Tokyo on issues such as the war in Ukraine and China’s growing assertiveness in the South and East China seas and near Taiwan.
Indeed, Japan has arguably been the most outspoken Asian nation to support Kyiv following Moscow’s February 2022 invasion. Tokyo has also been in lockstep with Washington’s approach to its relationship with China, using its latest National Security Strategy to label the Asian powerhouse the “greatest strategic challenge” to the peace and security of Japan.
Emanuel is also known for having played a critical role in deepening defense-industrial collaboration. A key element of this effort was last year’s launch of the Defense Industrial Cooperation, Acquisition and Sustainment (DICAS) forum, a framework to identify new areas of collaboration such as having U.S. aircraft and warships repaired in Japan — part of a push by the ambassador to do away with what he says are “outdated and outmoded” restrictions.
“We're going to, for the first time ever, have Japanese shipyards start repairing U.S. ships,” he says. “You couldn't have done that before.”
Still, in terms of marking off a checklist of key alliance challenges, Emanuel says he is satisfied with the progress made.
“Without a doubt, from credibility of deterrence and ability to confront every one of those challenges, (the alliance) is far better prepared and far more credible and far more aligned on every one of what you would call the major security challenges,” he says.
Not your typical ambassador
Known as an outspoken and at times bare-knuckled political operator, some observers initially feared he was ill-suited to be ambassador to Japan.
His style, they said, would ruffle feathers in polite Tokyo, potentially jeopardizing the relationship just as Biden was putting a premium on building up alliances following the tumultuous years of his predecessor.
He quickly dispelled those fears, winning plaudits from supporters and even some critics for his ability to connect with Japan’s political and business elite, as well as people from all walks of life that he encountered on his many journeys across the country — usually via bullet train as part of more than 60 such trips in total.
This has stood in stark contrast to the traditional image of American diplomacy.
Upon arriving in Japan, Emanuel says he quickly noticed that “there was like zero engagement with the public.”
“The United States government official comes, seven SUVs pull up, all black, doors open, guys with earpieces, sunglasses stand at the door,” he says. “And then one door opens up, and the Cabinet official walks in, walks past the cameras, and then an hour later, comes back, gets in the car, doesn't say anything and then the seven SUVs drive off. That was America's image from the Japanese public.”
From that moment, he decided to make both himself and visiting Cabinet members and top officials more accessible.
Soon, American VIP visitors were encouraged to hold media engagements, visit high schools and universities for lectures and even just venture out to enjoy all Tokyo and other cities have to offer (Emanuel even reveals that in one instance he joined national security adviser Jake Sullivan for a trip “to three or four bars.”)
Emanuel’s unorthodox approach was even the impetus for the first-ever trilateral summit between U.S., Japanese and Philippine leaders last April.
During a breakfast with the U.S. ambassador to the Philippines, as he tells it, a discussion of South Korea led to the suggestion that they coauthor a memo to the State Department and National Security Council suggesting the usefulness of such a meeting.
Nine months later, then-Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, U.S. President Joe Biden and Philippine leader Ferdinand Marcos Jr. sat down for the inaugural summit.
But while Emanuel admits senior administration officials have afforded him a certain level of trust that he wouldn’t go rogue, he’s well aware that having every ambassador doing things this way would be a nonstarter.
“You just can't run an international, global system like that,” he says. “But you also can't run a system where nobody can be entrepreneurial in it and set an initiative up.”
No stranger to controversy
During his career Emanuel has been no stranger to controversy, so it was inevitable that his pugnacious style would at times spill out into the open during his time in Tokyo. Still, some might say that the controversies that have emerged were not exactly on the same level as the ones he endured before his arrival.
Overstepping diplomatic boundaries — as critics allege he has done by organizing fellow ambassadors and activists to push Japan to embrace LGBTQ+ rights — pales in comparison to the widespread criticism he faced over his handling of the 2014 police murder of Black 17-year-old Laquan McDonald while serving as mayor of Chicago.
And while his boycott of an annual ceremony marking the atomic bombing of Nagasaki because Israel had not been invited garnered headlines, anger over the matter was quick to dissipate after he instead attended a ceremony at a Buddhist temple in Tokyo honoring bombing victims.
Rather, what has been memorable is Emanuel’s protocol-busting use of the X social media platform to take on what he says is Chinese “hypocrisy.” The ambassador’s jabs at Beijing have often been caustic and aggressive — raising eyebrows among some of his administration colleagues — but they have always been unfiltered.
In one example from last September, Emanuel took Beijing to task with a post dripping in sarcasm following the first incursion into Japanese airspace by a Chinese military aircraft in recent memory and the sailing of a Chinese Navy ship into Japanese territorial waters just days later.
“China says it’s still ‘investigating and verifying’ the recent violation of Japan’s airspace by one of its surveillance planes. But with a Chinese survey ship sailing into Japanese waters only the other day, two territorial incursions in less than a week looks more intentional than accidental,” he wrote. “Not one to usually offer free advice to the PLA, but #GoogleMaps is a great (free) option. It goes without saying, obviously, it will need a VPN to bypass China’s Great Firewall.”
In another post focused on the lack of radioactive tritium detected more than a month after Japan began dumping treated water from the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean, the ambassador laid into Beijing for continuing to fish in Japan’s exclusive economic zone — despite its blanket ban on Japanese marine product imports.
“Seems like China got a jump on the news; no wonder they continue to catch fish in Japan’s EEZ,” he wrote. “They have a choice between fiction or fact, and they choose fiction so they can keep fishing. Everyone can see through China’s smoke & mirrors.”
Drawing attention to “the duplicity of China’s actions and rhetoric” can be done in different ways, Emanuel wrote in a commentary in The Washington Post in late November.
“For someone like me who tends to occasionally shoot from the lip, social media has been an important tool for shining a light on Beijing’s malign methods,” he added.
Emanuel disputes that his approach is hard line — or even controversial.
“Which part was hard line? Was it that Japan can't send fish from its own waters to China, but China can fish in Japan's waters for the same safety concern? Was that controversial?” he asks when queried about his approach. “Maybe it's controversial because it exposes the hypocrisy (by Beijing), but I thought it was honest.”
Despite this, Emanuel’s disarming personality and willingness to push the envelope beyond traditional diplomatic approaches has also allowed him to be more than one-dimensional in his dealings with Beijing.
In one example, he erupts into laughter over a story of an encounter with a young employee from the Chinese Embassy in Tokyo whose job was to read the ambassador’s posts to X.
“‘I must be like a caffeinated coffee,’” the ambassador recounts telling the man ahead of his first meeting with his Chinese counterpart. “He says, ‘no, more like a double espresso.’”
Emanuel also notes that at a lunch with Chinese Ambassador to Japan Wu Jianghao, rather than focus on stilted talking points, he steered their conversation toward what he says was an “honest” and “informative” discussion about similar economic challenges the two countries’ youth and middle class face.
Trust your allies
Now, as the countdown to his departure from Tokyo begins — U.S. President-elect Donald Trump is due to be sworn in on Jan. 20 and has picked his former envoy to Portugal, businessman George Glass, to be the next ambassador to Japan — Emanuel, who spoke to Glass recently, stresses that any advice he has for his successor will be given to the person directly.
But he does offer a hint of what could make or break an American ambassador in Tokyo.
“I do think trust is important,” Emanuel says. “I think you've got to build trust up with your Japanese interlocutors. And I think you’ve got to especially build it up, given you have a different prime minister today in Japan than when (Shinzo) Abe was here, or when (Fumio) Kishida was here.”
Emanuel says that a failure to win the hearts and minds of U.S. allies would hand Beijing an easy win.
“The Indo-Pacific is a home game for China. It's an away game for the United States,” he says. “If you want to level the playing field so it's not advantageous to China, you can only do it with allies. And if you want your allies to be beneficial to leveling that play field, they have to have trust and confidence.
“You cannot confront China and also confront your allies,” he adds.
As for his legacy — one that he says has been honest about both U.S. successes and where it fell short — he is sanguine.
“Others can judge this, and they'll judge it, but based on everything I've heard from a cross section of people, I'm handing off the relationship in a better position today than the one I found when I first got here — and it was strong then.”
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