Japan’s New Ambassador to U.S. Finds Relations at ‘Critical Moment’ Over Trade

Nobuo Matsunaga, ambassador-designate to the United States, said Wednesday that relations between Japan and the United States have reached “a very critical moment.”

His comment came a day after Saburo Okita, a former foreign minister who now heads a Cabinet advisory committee on external economic problems, declared that “sentiment in the United States is like that before the outbreak of a war.” Okita, who just returned from a visit to Washington, also said that Japan-U.S. relations had reached a critical stage.

Speaking to American reporters, Matsunaga acknowledged that four market-opening “packages” that Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone’s government has announced since January, 1983, “have not produced very concrete results.”

Matsunaga said he hopes that a fifth package, which the government will announce early next month, will ease American “frustrations and pressures for protectionism.” But he added, “At this moment, I can only say ‘hope.’ ”

‘My Last Mission’

He said Japan risks protectionist legislation in Congress and added, “(That) would be most unfortunate for both (of our) countries, as well as for all other countries of the world.”

Matsunaga, 62, will arrive in Washington on March 26 to begin what he called “my last mission” in a diplomatic career that has spanned 39 years. He was vice foreign minister, Japan’s highest-ranking career diplomat, until January, when Nakasone named him to the U.S. post. He will succeed Yoshio Okawara in Washington.

Current trade issues with the United States “are certainly not easy ones to resolve,” Matsunaga said, but Japanese should view the opening of their own market not as a way to satisfy the United States but as a way to promote the world’s free trade system, from which Japan has benefited greatly.

$36.9-Billion Surplus

“At present,” he said, “there is a strong perception in the United States that the Japanese market is not open enough to assure fair competition. That is what we have to take very seriously.

“Many Japanese believe we cannot continue (our) present huge export surpluses,” he said, referring to Japan’s $36.9-billion surplus last year in trade with the United States. The trouble is that “they do not have concrete and decisive ideas of what measures should be taken,” he added.

Despite economic frictions, overall Japan-U.S. relations have “never been as good as now,” Matsunaga said. But he acknowledged that “going to the United States at this moment is very challenging.”

“My mission may be extremely difficult.”