Japan heavily reliant on Chinese imports
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China is found to have had a more than 50% share in 1,133 categories of imported goods or 23% of the value of Japan's imports in 2019.
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A display at the Semicon China trade fair in Shanghai
A new trade analysis by Japan's Cabinet Office revealed Japan's vulnerability to Chinese supplies.
China was found to have had a share exceeding 50% in 1,133 categories of imported goods, or 23% of the value of Japan's imports in 2019 according to the report.
Japan's reliance on Chinese products was more than twice as much as the US, which it imported 590 categories of goods from.
This data shined the light on Tokyo's economic security, as it relies on China for a wide variety of goods, but its dependence was more obvious in products like smartphones and laptops. China had an 85.7% share of the phones Japan imported, up from 69.1% a decade earlier.
As for laptops and tablets, Japan gets nearly all of its imported products from China, which has a 98.8% share in that market.
Although it highly depends on its neighbor across the sea for information technology devices and semiconductors, Japan shifted import from labor-intensive products to Vietnam, Indonesia, and other countries in Southeast Asia because of the rise of Chinese labor costs. While Japan bought 91.7% of its shoes from China in 2009, that number was down to 6% in 2019.
"In the event that exports from China are interrupted by a supply shock or shipping delays, it would be difficult for Japan to switch to other sources for many items ... and the financial impact would be substantial," Japan's Cabinet Office warned.
