Building Bonds

As the United States celebrates its birth this month, the country’s ambassador to Japan, Rahm Emanuel, shares his thoughts on bilateral relations, diplomacy and the Club.

July Fourth was typically spent at a small, lakeside cottage about an hour-and-a-half’s drive from Chicago.

Rahm Emanuel, his wife, Amy Rule, and their three children would spend the American holiday with a large group of close friends and their families.

The highlight, Emanuel recalls, was the hourlong fireworks show he would organize with a “biking buddy.”

“All the kids loved it,” he says. “We would then go down to the beach, dig a hole, make a pit and a big fire, have chicken, hamburgers, hot dogs, and the kids would go running all over the beach all the way till midnight or 1 in the morning. We did that every summer.”

Many Americans have similar cherished memories of Independence Day celebrations filled with barbecues, friends and fireworks. As the United States marks its 246th birthday this July Fourth, Emanuel, now serving as his country’s 31st ambassador to Japan, is aware of the diplomatic opportunities the holiday offers.

“It’s a chance to show that America is not a piece of land, we’re a set of ideals established around ideas and principles. The Fourth of July, as our national holiday, is the way we celebrate those ideas: our sense of independence, freedom and liberty, as well as freedom of expression and faith,” he says.

“Therefore, when you celebrate the Fourth of July and America’s independence from Great Britain, you are also celebrating something that’s most fundamental to the United States, which is a set of ideas and ideals, of which freedom, liberty and equality are at the core.”

As America’s envoy to Tokyo, Emanuel reinforces those principles in every meeting, negotiation and bilateral initiative to which he offers his support.

After being tapped by US President Joe Biden to serve as ambassador, Emanuel, 62, arrived in the Japanese capital in January. But he is no stranger to public service. He was elected to the House of Representatives in 2003 and later worked as former US President Barack Obama’s chief of staff for nearly two years from January 2009. He then served as mayor of Chicago, his hometown, for eight years.

Sitting in the great room of the ambassador’s residence in Akasaka, which has welcomed eight US presidents through its doors since 1931 (most recently Biden in May), Emanuel reflects on his first six months in the job.

He has already visited 10 of Japan’s 47 prefectures, including Hiroshima, the hometown of Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, where he laid a wreath at the cenotaph for atomic bomb victims in the city’s Peace Memorial Park.

In March, Emanuel traveled to the Tohoku region for the 11th anniversary of the devastating earthquake and tsunami that left more than 18,000 people dead or missing. While in Iwate Prefecture, he learned about the relief efforts of the US forces in Japan as part of Operation Tomodachi, and in Miyagi Prefecture, he told Kesennuma Mayor Shigeru Sugawara that there were “no limits to the friendship between the United States and Japan.”

Image (right): US Ambassador Rahm Emanuel on a train in Osaka

The relationship between the US and Japan, Emanuel says, is much more than a strategic alliance.

“An alliance is a treaty, an expression of political will. But there’s so much more,” he says. “What is the national pastime here? Baseball. What’s ours? Baseball. And so, you have a cultural affinity, not just a legal document that binds two countries together. There are so many crossovers that we share.”

Since World War II, the two nations have grown every closer, collaborating on everything from medical research to renewable energy.

“I think there’s something else for the rest of the world to learn from our relationship: we were foes and now we’re the best of friends,” Emanuel says. “That tells you the possibilities—when you hear and see each other—of what can be achieved.”

Image: (l–r) US Ambassador Rahm Emanuel, US President Joe Biden and Amy Rule

With political tensions exacerbated by the pandemic back home, what can the US learn from its partner across the Pacific? Emphasizing the differences between the two societies, Emanuel singles out Japan’s relative harmony.

“I think one of the biggest challenges for America, and I say this as somebody who loves the country, is that our differences are becoming divisions. I haven’t witnessed that in Japan. I’m not saying it doesn’t exist, I just haven’t seen it,” he says. “We’ve always had those differences, but they’ve never become this type of division. There have been points where there has been division, but it healed. Now they’ve been tearing at each other. So that’s one thing that I think Japan can teach us.”

Lauding Japan’s “incredibly rich and deep culture,” Emanuel equates life here to peeling back the layers of an onion. But the demands of diplomacy and his schedule limit his chances to explore.

“I wish I had more time to actually go around. I believe there’s this whole deeper culture and it’s passing me by because I don’t get a chance to see it,” he says. “I do worry about the fact that my tenure will go so quickly that I will barely have scratched the surface, and I will have lived here three years.”

In the short time the ambassador has been in the role, the US and Japan have reached major agreements on space and lunar exploration, trade in beef, soybeans and ethanol, steel tariffs and the opening of a regional Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) office in Japan.

“I think that over the next three years we’re going to really determine the foundation of the relationship—not just on a [bilateral] basis, but what I call going from alliance protection to alliance projection,” Emanuel says.

While there have been trade conflicts between the two countries in recent decades, Emanuel sees a very different relationship today.

“Our ally, Japan, which is our long pole in the Indo-Pacific, is really strategically aligned with us not just on defense but on foreign policy, about how to interact with the countries in the region and keep the American presence in the economic sphere dominant in the area,” he says. “So, for the first time, the policy goals are aligned and the politics are aligned. There is real opportunity here.”

Image: US Ambassador Rahm Emanuel with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida in Hiroshima

These good relations were reinforced during Biden’s recent trip to Tokyo when, Emanuel says, the president and Kishida switched from using formal titles to calling one another by their first name by the end of the first day.

“That’s a telling sign,” he says. “It was very symbolic.”

Amid the day-to-day pressures of the job of ambassador, the Club has become somewhat of an escape for Emanuel.

“I get there in the morning, five days a week, and do my workout routine and swim. Everybody is very respectful, very nice,” he says. “Nobody disturbs me at the Club. I go do my workout and people respect my privacy. They know that this is the one time in the day that I can think and clear my head. So that’s very, very respectful. And the staff is great. They could not be more helpful.”

Like America itself, the Club’s membership is a melting pot of nationalities and cultures. Who better then to serve as the Club’s honorary president than the envoy of a nation that celebrates its diversity each July Fourth?