India’s relations with two of its most formidable partners, the US and Japan, show a stark trend. On all security and strategic matters, all three talk in the same language of military cooperation, maintaining crucial SLOCs free from domination of any one country and a law based global order. However, on trade and commerce, India’s relation with both the US and Japan are cases of glass more empty than full. Much has been written about the decoupling of the strategic and economic relations between India and the US, but the similar decoupling in India-Japan trade and economic relations is not much discussed. In this essay, we try to analyze the dynamics of this discrepancy which has kept the Indo-Japanese economic relations at a suboptimal level.