New Orleans, located at the mouth of the Mississippi River, served as a hub for grain shipments originating from the Midwestern United States and the cotton trade.

[3] Yutaka Horiba, an economics professor at Tulane University, said that while the State of Louisiana had focused on establishing relationships with the oil and gas industry, the states of Kentucky and Tennessee had made attempts to establish relations with Japan for a period of several decades before 2007; Horiba believed that this weakened the relationship between Louisiana and the Government of Japan.

[2] In 2006 Dominique Thormann, a senior vice president with Nissan, told journalists in Washington DC that the Japanese government planned to move the consulate to Nashville.

Koichi Funayama, who was serving as the consul-general in New Orleans, said that according to a 2005 survey, the states of Kentucky and Tennessee had over 200 Japanese companies.

[2] For the first nine months of 2007, Japan took over $2 billion worth of Louisiana-origin goods, making it the state's second largest export market.