No one wins a trade war in the end. Not even politicians. A spat between South Korea and Japan, triggered by a row over compensation for wartime forced labour, will be no exception. In the latest escalation, both countries have removed one another from trade whitelists and South Korea’s national pension fund has threatened to disinvest from Japanese companies. Given the unique trade dynamics linking the pair, the battle makes even less sense than the tussle between the US and China.

Japanese exports to South Korea are almost double imports. The scope of trade is narrow. Japan mainly supplies materials that South Korea uses to make chips and displays for global export. South Korea has 73 per cent of the market for DRAM chips and more than 90 per cent for organic light-emitting diode (OLED) displays.

The pawns analogous to Huawei, the Chinese telecoms group at the centre of the US-China dispute, are Samsung and LG. They are the principal consumers of specialist chemicals for chip cleaning, whose export Japan has curbed. South Korea may limit chip exports in retaliation.