Trade policy openness — tariffs, non-tariff barriers, FTAs, industrial protection.
Targeted industrial and sectoral subsidies (renewable energy, chip manufacturing, agriculture, green hydrogen, etc).
Japanese response to the April 2025 US reciprocal-tariff announcement (24% headline rate on Japanese imports, 25% on autos, 25% on steel and aluminium). Japan pursued negotiation rather than immediate retaliation, with chief negotiator Ryosei Akazawa making multiple trips to Washington between April and July 2025. A US-Japan trade understanding announced 22 July 2025 and operationalised from early August set an effective 15% tariff level on Japanese imports and 15% on autos (down from 25%), paired with a framework for up to $550bn in Japanese investment commitments in US strategic sectors (semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, critical minerals, shipbuilding). Japan did not impose counter-tariffs. Domestic Japanese response included a cost-of-living supplementary package with energy subsidies and SME support for tariff-exposed exporters.
Per invariant 3, reforms are scored by what they did on each channel-separated axis, not by the party that enacted them. This fingerprint is how the policy-match engine finds historical analogues.
Explicit links are curated by the author. Inferred links are hypotheses in the library that test the same axes this policy moved — the framework's answer to "what does the data say about a policy like this?".
Ranked by axis-fingerprint overlap with this policy. Direction match bolded — those are the closest historical analogues. Shape of the match is what drives policy-outcome comparison, not the country or party label.