Patience, Rahm Emanuel likes to say, is a waste of time.
The former congressman, chief of staff to President Barack Obama and mayor of Chicago is brash, a touch cocky and frequently profane. Above all, he wants to get things done. Yesterday.
As the United States ambassador to Japan, a country where change typically follows a long process of quiet consensus-building referred to as “nemawashi,” Mr. Emanuel, 65, was initially seen as an unorthodox appointment. But maybe, he suggests, he was just what Japan needed.
“I think on a lot of things, Japan was ready to go,” said Mr. Emanuel, referring to a recent cascade of bold revisions to the country’s defense policy. In the past three years, Japan has doubled the amount earmarked for military spending, acquired Tomahawk missiles from the United States and, in a reversal of postwar restrictions on weapons exports, agreed to manufacture American-designed Patriot missiles to sell to the U.S. government.
Although he acknowledged the groundwork was laid before he arrived, Mr. Emanuel said these changes didn’t simply coincide with his term as American envoy to Tokyo.
“While I was here, they did more, went faster and farther and deeper than I think they themselves originally thought,” he said during an interview late last month in the library of his residence in Tokyo. “Did I contribute to that?” Mr. Emanuel said. “Uh, yeah.”
Just how much credit should go to Mr. Emanuel is a matter of perspective.
“Ambassador Emanuel shared various ideas with me and offered advice,” the former prime minister, Fumio Kishida, who left office in early October, said in an interview late last month in his parliamentary office in Tokyo. But “it was the Japanese government that made the decisions.”
Mr. Emanuel plans to leave Japan early next year before Donald J. Trump’s second presidential inauguration, and said he hopes to “figure out something in public service.”
He demurred on specifics, saying only that he was consulting with family and friends. His long career in politics and a stint in banking have left him with a wide network he is not afraid to tap. He sat for this interview in a wood-paneled room lined with a collection of books bought with donations from high-placed friends, including $50,000 from Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase.
Whereas previous ambassadors, like former Vice President Walter F. Mondale or the three-term Senator Howard H. Baker Jr., landed in Tokyo after retiring from politics, Mr. Emanuel and his future ambitions made him “eager to make achievements” for the alliance between the United States and Japan, said Keiko Iizuka, a senior political writer at the Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan’s largest newspaper.
As much as anything, Mr. Emanuel was a vociferous cheerleader for Japan when rising competition from China and the wars in Ukraine and Gaza were drawing the most attention in Washington. He frequently bashed China on social media, unsettling some American colleagues who found his tenor inconsistent with official messaging, but “he was a fierce defender of Japan,” said Kurt M. Campbell, the deputy secretary of state.
Mr. Campbell said the ambassador called “every single day” to talk about a Japan-related agenda item. “Do I like that all the time?” Mr. Campbell said. “I do not. But it is relentless, and it is effective.”
Mr. Emanuel said he came to realize the importance of Japan’s leadership in the Pacific, particularly in Southeast Asia, where the country has spent decades on diplomatic outreach and investment. He was impressed, he said, when Japan successfully lobbied several countries in the region to support the United Nations resolution in March 2022 to condemn Russia for its invasion of Ukraine.
Japan should “get full, 100 percent credit,” Mr. Emanuel said. “I mean, that’s not something we could have done.”
Takeo Akiba, Japan’s national security adviser and a frequent visitor to the ambassador’s residence, said Mr. Emanuel understood how both governments were “aiming at the same goal.” But he dismissed the “easy thinking” of regarding the ambassador’s success as “the U.S. side putting pressure on Japan.”
In a culture where formal niceties smooth many interactions, Mr. Emanuel was blunt and dogged. He can be self-effacing about his style, joking that he has never sent dead fish while in Japan, as he is reported to have done once to a political rival. “They have them everywhere,” he said. “It doesn’t carry the big punch.”
Minoru Kihara, the defense minister from September 2023 until this fall, said Mr. Emanuel called or visited the minister’s office more than any other country’s ambassador. “We were able to get straight to the point in the limited time we had,” Mr. Kihara said. “Yet still not be rude to each other.”
Mr. Kihara credited Mr. Emanuel with helping Japan purchase Tomahawk missiles ahead of schedule and collaborating on an agreement to allow American naval ships to be repaired in Japan.
The full blast of Mr. Emanuel’s personality emerged on social media, where he broadcast his trips to various prefectures, often with his wife, Amy Rule, or poked at Russia or China.
His gibes at China on X were often aggressive and sarcastic. “The PRC won’t be winning a People’s Choice Award anytime soon,” Mr. Emanuel wrote in one typical post. “The world just isn’t buying its ‘friendly neighbor’ and ‘reliable partner’ spin.” He made such remarks, he said, “to create a space for our allies to have the confidence.”
When China banned Japanese seafood imports to protest the release of treated radioactive wastewater from the ruined Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, Mr. Emanuel visited Fukushima, posting photographs with fishermen and eating sashimi with a mayor. He served seafood from Fukushima to guests at his residence and persuaded the U.S. military to buy scallops from the prefecture.
That kind of publicity “was a great help to Japan,” Mr. Akiba said.
Mr. Emanuel also relished the nitty-gritty of diplomatic compromise.
In one instance in 2022, he recalled, the Japanese government asked the U.S. military to curtail planned exercises near Okinawa in the weeks preceding an upper house parliamentary election. Mr. Emanuel said he helped broker a deal with the Japanese government to keep the bulk of the exercises on schedule, while the American military restricted some night flights.
Adm. John C. Aquilino, a retired commander of the United States Indo-Pacific Command, said Mr. Emanuel was “my first call” to resolve such situations. “Without his interaction, they could have turned into a crisis,” he said.
A spokesman from Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs declined to comment on the specifics of the operational coordination.
Mira Rapp-Hooper, the senior director for East Asia and Oceania at the National Security Council, said Mr. Emanuel could handle “extremely granular and technical” details alongside broad strategy. “Working with Rahm was like having the most powerful of guided weapons in our corner,” she said.
Mr. Emanuel’s deal-making ability — and political necessity — helped him work with colleagues across the aisle in Congress to secure the nomination to the ambassador’s post despite opposition from progressives in the Democratic Party.
Senator Dan Sullivan, Republican of Alaska, said he had agreed to support Mr. Emanuel if he would promote Alaskan efforts to export natural gas to Japan. As ambassador, Mr. Emanuel hosted summits and wrote an opinion essay in The Wall Street Journal supporting natural gas, dismaying environmentalists. He “kept his word,” Mr. Sullivan said.
Critics in Japan denounced Mr. Emanuel for overstepping diplomatic boundaries, such as when he organized a group of ambassadors to nudge Japan to embrace L.G.B.T.Q. rights as a bill was pending in Japan’s Parliament, or when he boycotted the annual peace memorial ceremony in Nagasaki to mark the day the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city because Israel had not been invited.
“If you only want to do big things that nobody disagrees with,” said Mr. Emanuel, “they’re not going to be very big.”
As he prepares to leave Japan, Mr. Emanuel acknowledged the fragility of some of the agreements — like stronger trilateral cooperation between Japan, the United States and South Korea — that he helped shepherd.
“Are the bones there? Is the blueprint there?” he asked. “Yeah, but you need a commitment to it.”
As for his legendary impatience? “I’ve been here three years,” he said. “But for the Japanese, it has felt like 30.”
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