Battery wars

Japan, often perceived as being discriminatory in its classification of imports, leading to charges of protectionism, is now under attack from a neighbor.

Korea has recently announced that imported lithium-ion batteries must meet new safety standards, with violators facing a maximum theoretical sentence of up to a year in prison.

Naturally, this has upset Japanese makers, who supply 60% or so of the world's batteries of this type, and the Japanese government intends to take the issue to the WTO.

Korea, for its part, simply states that this is a safety measure, designed to protect consumers from exploding batteries (see the example test situation below):

It will be interesting to see how this spat evolves.