FOREIGN MINISTER MOTEGI: (Via interpreter) It is a great pleasure to see you, Mr. Secretary, my current counterpart to Japan's most important dialogue. And also we feel very grateful for your meeting the families of abductees a moment ago, and that you extended very warm words for them. Thank you so much.
During President Trump's first term I served as Japan's chief negotiator in the Japan-U.S. trade talks and subsequently as foreign minister supporting the Japan-U.S. relations under Prime Minister Abe and President Trump. While there were times of tough negotiations, we worked through all those challenges, and the Japan-U.S. relations made significant progress.
Prime Minister Takaichi and President Trump held a substantial exchange of views in a cordial and warm atmosphere this morning. I look forward to working closely with you, Mr. Secretary, to demonstrate the world's greatest alliance, Japan-U.S. alliance, to the world.
SECRETARY RUBIO: Well, thank you for welcoming us. It's been a phenomenal visit already with the President and the prime minister. We're very happy that this came together and for this opportunity to see one another, and I believe we'll see each other again in just 24 hours in another country, in South Korea.
PARTICIPANT: (Inaudible.)
SECRETARY RUBIO: Oh, you understood - oh, yeah. That's not fair. (Laughter.)
I - as you've talked about it, we - today we signed a number of agreements, the President signed with the prime minister. But all of these negotiations and talks and trade deals and partnerships on critical minerals are all built on a very powerful foundation which has been laid over the decades between our two countries. The foundation - economic foundation is very strong. Japan has long been one of the largest if not the largest in many cases investors in the U.S. economy. The partnerships that we've had on a number of business fronts has been extraordinary.
And then our national security interests align quite often - in fact, most of the time, few instances that I can recall where the United States' and Japan's national security interests are not aligned. Now we have to build on that by modernizing our relationship for the challenges of the 21st century in the field of technology, where we as advanced economies face threats in cyber security, in personal data, in cyber theft, and all of the challenges; as advanced manufacturing economies, threats to our supply chains. We can never live in a world where others achieve dominance through dependency - our dependency allows others to establish dominance over us. We have much to work on together.
So it's an exciting new era in the U.S.-Japan relationship, but it's built on the foundation of decades of working together, and now it's being modernized to reflect the challenges of the new era that we're going to confront together like we confronted the challenges for the last 80 years.
