Japan heavily dependent on China for imported items, report says

Japan’s imported goods have been heavily dependent on China, which accounted for 23% of all items imported from around the world in 2019, the Cabinet Office said Thursday.

In a report on world economic trends, the government agency compared Japan’s degree of dependence on imports from China — sometimes euphemized as the “world’s factory” — with Germany’s dependence on the Unites States.

The report warned that “the country’s import structure is risky.”

The reported stated that compared with the United States and Germany, it would be more difficult for Japan to find substitutes for Chinese-made goods if supply were to run short.

For Japan, imports from China made up 98.8% of all imports of laptop and tablet computers and 85.7% for mobile phones.

Meanwhile, the share of shoes imported from China came to 66.0% in 2019, sharply down from 91.7% in 2009.

“In line with China’s industrial advancement, Japan’s imports from China are shifting from labor-intensive products to capital-intensive products that require technologies,” the report said.