Japan expected more products to be removed from US' Section 232 tariffson steel and aluminum imports, but welcomed the initial announcement ofexemptions from the US Department of Commerce on June 20, which included someproducts from Japan.

US announced that it had excluded 42 requests, from seven differentcompanies importing steel products from five countries including Japan. NachiAmerica of Greenwood in Indiana, a production base for Japan's steel bearingproducer Fujikoshi, was one such company.

"US finally started announcing the products to be excluded fromadditional duties, it is just a start of the exemptions. But we expect morerequests by end-users in the US, for products imported from Japan, will beaccepted," a Tokyo-based steel trader said Thursday.

The trader said many more exclusion requests for imports from Japan werestill awaiting results and were expecting to be exempted from the tariffs.

"But we wonder which products were actually admitted as exemptionproducts and, which products were denied. It is unclear and we cannot find theactual impact," the trader said.

An official from the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry saidThursday that the exemption announced Wednesday was for product base, butJapan's original stance was that all steel and aluminum products from Japan tothe US should be excluded because those had never been a threat to US nationalsecurity. Furthermore, there are no alternatives to the products supplied fromJapan.

"We will continue investigating the impact and decide on the best actionto take," he said.

• [Editor:tianyawei]