Fair trade? Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe met with President Barack Obama at the White House, April 28, 2015. High on the agenda, the vast trade deal known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP. Andrew Harrer / Bloomberg / Getty Images

Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe arrived in Washington Monday amid unrest and anxiety in a deeply segregated Baltimore. But Abe and President Barack Obama met to quell anxieties of a national kind: economic and strategic, provoked by fears of a rising China.

Two topics are on the agenda — the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty, which Abe hopes to strengthen as part of a broader push toward militarization; and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade deal of unprecedented scale and part of Obama’s long promised pivot toward Asia.

The TPP aims to establish the world’s largest free-trade zone, affecting an estimated 40 percent of global commerce. Japan and the U.S. are the biggest players in this 12-country agreement, nearly a decade in the works, but their citizens still know little of the agreement’s contents. Now, in the U.S. a fast-track bill moving through the Senate could accelerate the process for making the TPP binding.

All this trade talk can seem an impenetrable thicket of arcane economics and alphabet soup. Here we provide answers to some basic questions: Are accords like the TPP still necessary in our Internet-enabled, globalized world? What makes trade more or less free? And what does it all mean for workaday people in the U.S. and the other TPP nations?