For anyone who follows East Asia, here’s a question: what is Japan’s

For anyone who follows East Asia, here’s a question: what is Japan’s guiltiest secret?

The “comfort women” scandal? The Nanking massacre? Official homage to war criminals at the Yasukuni shrine?

No, no, and no. If by a guilty secret we mean something that Japan really, really wants to sweep under the rug, none of the above comes even close. Japan actually often goes out of its way to publicize these issues: click here for the official Japanese news agency’s account of today’s carefully timed visit by Keiji Furuya to Yasukuni. With Kyodo’s help and the fact that Easter Sunday is, of course, a particularly slow news day in the West, this relative nonentity has made headlines everywhere from the South China Morning Post to the BBC World Service.

We will look more closely at Japan’s attitude to such controversies in a moment. For now let’s note that Japan does have secrets and big ones – secrets it strives with unique ingenuity and success to keep out of the Western media.

Top of the list is something that – at least for those of us who know Japan – is hidden in plain sight: the Japanese auto market. Fifty years after the Tokyo authorities ostensibly began opening to free trade, the Japanese auto market remains one of the world’s most closed. I don’t mean just that Detroit-made cars don’t get a look in. These are, with few exceptions, unsuitable for Japanese roads. But the Detroit Big Three’s subsidiaries in Europe, particularly subsidiaries of Ford and General Motors, make plenty of cars that – in a fair world – should do well in Japan. After all such cars compete, and in many cases compete strongly, against Japanese competition across Europe. They don’t have a prayer against Japan’s non-tariff barriers.

Even more tellingly Volkswagen is a tiny also-ran in Japan, with just 1 percent of the market. Yet Volkswagen is no slouch in other markets and in fact ranks broadly equal to Toyota as the world’s largest auto-maker (the days when that title seemed to be General Motors’s by birthright are gone).

Then there is Renault, which is supposedly (at least if you believe the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal) the senior partner in an alliance with Japan’s second largest automaker Nissan. For more than a decade now Renault chief Carlos Ghosn has been trying to get Renault cars into Nissan showrooms. The last I heard he was even living much of his time in the posh Tokyo district of Azabu in one of the world’s more expensive rental apartments. He has remarkably little to show for his efforts: to the extent that the Renault has established any presence in Japan it is as a make of bicycles. Made under license in Taiwan, Renault bicycles have captured, on an optimistic count, perhaps 1 percent of the Japanese bicycle market!

http://www.forbes.com/sites/eamonnfingleton/2014/04/20/whats-japans-guiltiest-secret-hint-its-not-the-comfort-women/?partner=yahootix