Abstract

America has been fighting a bitter diplomatic and trade battle against blatant protectionism in Japan's $380 billion per year construction market. Focusing on a new international airport project near Osaka, this article explains why the dispute and its outcome are so crucial. At stake is open U.S. access to hundreds of billions of dollars more in contracts from new Japanese high-technology public works projects that will give the nation a new social infrastructure. If the U.S. continues to be shut out of Japan while Japanese continue to aggressively invade the U.S. and third-country markets, construction could become another major strategic industry in which American corporations will have lost a significant share of the global market.