Rahm Emanuel on Donald Trump’s return

A few minutes before the Nozomi 37 bullet train is due to leave Shin-Osaka station, a shoal of Japan Railways staff, local police, state department officials and bodyguards streams along an ornate corridor somewhere below the tracks.

The station master rushes Rahm Emanuel to a VIP waiting room, where America’s ambassador extraordinary and train geek plenipotentiary hovers to word a tweet: “60th milestone met! Three years and thousands of miles to reach my ‘kanreki’ in the shinkansen’s 60th anniversary year.” The occasion he is so keen to mark is his 60th trip on Japan’s bullet train since he arrived in the country in 2021.

There is a minor ticket-related fuss in the background, but nothing stops for more than a moment. The group ascends a marbled staircase, arriving on the platform exactly where the shinkansen door will open in a minute’s time. By design, the US ambassador will be making this journey in a crowded standard-class carriage. That’s part of the show. An official photographer snaps Emanuel boarding the train. At 4.02pm, with the ambassador in an aisle seat, and his security detail and staff scattered among the other passengers, the Nozomi 37 departs exactly on time.

It is all, indisputably, a palaver. But it is a precision-targeted, politically calculated palaver. A palaver with its own narrative, messaging and back story. It is what happens when a former mayor of Chicago and chief of staff to Barack Obama arrives in Tokyo as an envoy of the Biden administration and tells a professionally risk-averse embassy staff, “I’m going to get on a train, and you’re going to figure it out.” Emanuel appears to actively enjoy the logistical kerfuffle that each trip has caused. But there is a bittersweet feel to his final journey, as he prepares to return to the US and a very different political climate.

Emanuel is travelling to Hiroshima to receive an honorary doctorate from the city’s university and to sip a final Yamazaki whisky at a tiny backstreet bar introduced to him by the city’s mayor. It is a good coda to an ambassadorship that set out to actively strengthen the US-Japan relationship and, on balance, succeeded. Tangible achievements include providing the propulsion behind two groundbreaking trilateral summits, one between the US, Japan and South Korea, the other between the US, Japan and the Philippines, and pushing for a historic shift in the level of local command given to US military based in Japan.

But the fun is over. It is December 12 when Emanuel boards the train, and Trump’s election victory is still an open wound. Emanuel’s warning earlier in the year that the Democrats were not sufficiently in crisis mode has proven prescient, and the whole party is in a historic trough of despondency and exhaustion, as he puts it.

The result is also a personal blow. Had Kamala Harris won, some senior position would surely have come Emanuel’s way. Many in Tokyo and beyond had interpreted his relish for the ambassador post as a three-year audition for the job of secretary of state. “One thing the last 20 years has taught us is that the unpredictable is more predictable than the predictable,” he says. “But what is certain is you do need energy, you can’t be lethargic against this guy.” He will continue to spoil for some future clash with the incoming president.

Emanuel’s name has instead appeared on a long, speculative list of potential candidates to become chair of the Democratic National Committee, though it later turns out that he is not in the running. But there is no doubt that he is scheming. He has other projects in mind, he says, and intends to become a regular political commentator on TV. His brother, the Hollywood mogul Ari Emanuel, has tried to convince him to launch a podcast, where modern political influence now seems to be concentrated. Ari would know, I suggest. “Ari would know someone in the industry who would know,” he counters.

The trip is interrupted by the usual features of bullet train travel. A woman in the window seat gathers her bulky bags and climbs over Emanuel when she gets off at Okayama. A young couple canoodle across the aisle. At one point, Emanuel’s growly thoughts on the US relationship with China — specifically that “we have a fundamental problem if China thinks we’re gonna play the schmuck here” — are interrupted by the sound of loud meowing two rows behind us. He is convinced a cat is on board. An embassy staffer later assures us it was a child doing a brilliant cat impression.

For all the accomplishments of Emanuel’s time as ambassador, and his private assertions that he has been quietly “Trump-proofing” US foreign policy in east Asia, the outlook has recently become bleak. In September, Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida, who led a stable and effective government, and with whom Emanuel worked closely on regional security and other issues, suddenly announced he was stepping down. His departure led to a chaotic power struggle in the ruling Liberal Democratic party, a snap election and a humiliating loss of parliamentary control.

In early December, a few days before Emanuel’s final train ride, Yoon Suk Yeol, the South Korean president with whom the Biden administration worked closely to mend Seoul-Tokyo ties, declared martial law in a move that imploded his government and has threatened to return South Korea to a state of friction with Japan. Some weeks later, Nippon Steel’s proposed takeover of US Steel was finally blocked by Joe Biden on national security grounds. It was a decision that ran directly counter to the narrative of ever more entwined industrial and security co-operation between Tokyo and Washington at the centre of Emanuel’s diplomacy.

Emanuel places all this uncertainty against the now-permanent backdrop of the China threat and his outrage at the economic coercion, industrial espionage and what he has called out as the diplomatic hypocrisy of Beijing. He has benefited, he admits, from prosecuting all this at a time when the anti-China consensus in Washington is absolute.

After three years of tweets and media comments clearly designed to needle China, Emanuel has a closing thought. “The only thing I can say to Xi Jinping’s credit — and I want to thank him for this — is first, keep doing what you’re doing to the Chinese economy and, second, thank you for waking us up about a decade ahead of schedule. I think we woke literally, in the nick of time. Yeah. Now, are we making the most of that? I don’t know.”

On the bright side, Emanuel’s final journey seems to be everything he wanted. His delight in the shinkansen’s smoothness, speed, punctuality and efficiency is genuine — as is his despair that the US is not criss-crossed with high-speed rail lines.

He is publicly grateful to embassy staff but delights in stories where he has forced something (notoriously, a July 4 firework display in the grounds of the official residence) past their “this is how we’ve always done it” position. Emanuel has cast himself as the US ambassador who saw that Japan was changing, and that US diplomacy in Tokyo needed to change too.

But the trains were particularly clever. Emanuel’s insistence that he would travel across Japan on them, rather than in planes and limousines, was a stroke that took Japanese hard industrial power and spun it, via his fanboy tweets about his love of the trains, into US soft power.

“I knew about Japan’s trains, of course,” he says. “But I never knew till I got here how embedded [the shinkansen] was in the culture. The trains are to Japan what the NHS is to the UK. The whole of society is universally proud of it.” He leans forward for a better view as the setting sun over Kansai blurs past outside.

Leo Lewis is the FT’s Tokyo bureau chief

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