Scott Bessent will spend Tuesday in Tokyo for back-to-back meetings with Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, Finance Minister Satsuki Katayama and Bank of Japan Governor Kazuo Ueda before flying to Seoul on Wednesday for the China leg of his East Asia tour. The Treasury Secretary confirmed the schedule in a Sunday evening post on X.
The Tokyo agenda is unusually crowded. Japan's authorities have intervened in foreign-exchange markets twice since the start of April, most recently buying roughly $54 billion-worth of yen on May 6 — the largest single-day intervention since 2022. Bessent has privately told members of Congress that the United States supports "anti-speculative" interventions but not "structural depreciation defence", a distinction he is expected to explore with Katayama.
Takaichi, who took office in October 2025 as Japan's first woman prime minister, has built her early premiership around what she calls a "yen and supply" agenda — exchange-rate stability paired with national-security control of critical-minerals procurement. Rare earths, a category where Japan has spent the past decade trying to diversify away from Chinese supply, will be central to the Bessent meeting given the Treasury Secretary's subsequent Beijing visit.
Bloomberg reported on Monday that Bessent's unusually detailed grasp of Japanese economic policy — a legacy of his decades trading in Asian markets — would test Takaichi in a way past US Treasury Secretaries have not. The Japanese prime minister, by reputation a fast study, has spent the past fortnight in briefings with MOF and METI officials, according to The Japan Times.
Energy procurement will also feature. Japan has the world's largest LNG import bill — pushed sharply higher by the Iran war — and Bessent is expected to raise the possibility of additional US LNG long-term contracts. The two governments are working on a memorandum of understanding to be signed during Trump's eventual Tokyo stopover, the timing of which has slipped twice and is now tentatively pencilled for late June.
Domestic Japanese politics provide a separate backdrop. Takaichi's coalition holds a narrow Upper House majority and faces a national-election cycle in July 2026. The yen's slide to 168 per dollar in late April produced visible voter discomfort and was a contributing factor in the LDP's soft showing in last weekend's local elections in Kanagawa.
No joint statement is planned for the Tokyo leg. Both sides will brief separately, with formal deliverables held back for Bessent's onward Seoul and Beijing stops.