Japanese Attitudes at Heart of Nakasone Appeal
No matter how dissatisfied U.S. businessmen and members of Congress may be with this week’s trade pronouncements from Japan, it is clear that the government here took a highly unusual step in urging the Japanese people to change their way of thinking and adopt a more international attitude.
The strategy was outlined Tuesday as part of a so-called action plan drawn up in response to increasing demands from Washington and other Western capitals that the Japanese make it less difficult for foreigners to do business in Japan.
Many details have yet to be worked out, but Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone discussed some aspects of the plan in a television appearance, and a government statement touched on some of its other points.
While American response to the plan has been lukewarm to cold, Reagan Administration officials have highlighted the importance of Nakasone’s appeal on the need for an attitude change.
White House Chief of Staff Donald T. Regan noted that the effort to open Japan’s markets to imports “requires a change in attitude toward foreign imports. In this respect, (Nakasone’s) appeal is an important and welcome step.”
And Vice President George Bush, in a television interview Thursday, commented: “What was new, and I know it’s hard for Americans to understand that, is for a Japanese prime minister to go on television in his home country and say buy foreign. Can you imagine, when we had enormous trade surpluses, an American President getting up and saying buy foreign?”
Series of Recommendations
Nakasone’s remarks and the official statement both grew out of a series of recommendations made by Foreign Minister Saburo Okita and nine representatives from business, labor, agriculture and education. Nakasone’s Cabinet said it will “respect fully” the panel’s recommendation.
The panel said Japan’s system of distribution and its business customs make it “extremely difficult for foreigners to understand” how to do business here. It urged the Japanese to help foreign businessmen adjust to Japan’s ways of doing business. But it made it clear that the Japanese must also change their attitudes as consumers.
“The minds of the Japanese people must be internationalized so that we do not fall into the trap of simply pontificating on our uniqueness and wind up becoming self-centered outcasts,” the group declared. But first, it said, this should be made clear “to those directly in charge of policy formation and implementation.”
Japan has moved in the past to try to make its markets more accessible to foreigners, but bureaucrats have been given “a broad range for discretion” in implementing policy, and the panel blamed them for using that discretion to thwart or delay reforms proposed in six previous efforts to open Japanese markets.
Even as the government announcement was made, politicians in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, citing “special conditions” in Japan’s forest products industry, were taking steps to make sure that high tariffs and other obstacles to imports are retained.
Yet, Foreign Minister Okita’s group warned, “if conditions are left as they are today, we are in danger of losing international trust in our dealings.”
Nakasone appears to have taken to heart this word of caution. He proposed two important reforms.
One would end the government’s traditional responsibility for maintaining standards of product safety and quality--in effect shifting this responsibility to the consumer and market forces--and the other would permit Japanese executives working for foreign firms to sit on government commissions and make policy in their field of interest.
According to an official of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, it is not Japan’s markets that are closed but the minds of its big businessmen.
This official pointed out that Japan bought $14 billion worth of manufactured goods from the United States last year, an increase of $1.6 billion over the previous year. But he said there will be no really significant increase until the big firms start procuring more of their machinery and components from abroad.
This official said that Keijiro Murata, the minister of international trade and industry, plans to call in the presidents of more than a score of Japan’s largest exporting firms and urge them to increase their foreign buying.
He said that these executives can be expected to respond, as they have in the past, by citing costs and quality and delivery problems, but that the ministry intends to tell them to take steps to solve those problems. Among the things they might consider, he suggested, are long-term contracts with overseas firms, direct investment in them and giving them the guidance and technology needed to meet Japanese requirements.
One major impediment to Japan buying more abroad, said Ichiko Ishihara, a director of Takashimaya department stores and a leader of an all-women buying mission to the United States last fall, is the absence of buyers who are willing or capable of seeking overseas manufacturers to produce products to Japanese specifications.
Foreign Minister Okita and his panel acknowledged that there is still no national consensus on the need for internationalizing Japan. There was even a measure of dissent within the group that recommended internationalization.
According to Tsuneo Uno, an aide to Toshio Komoto, the minister of state to whom the report was submitted, some members of the group wanted to recommend that Japan simply abolish unilaterally its tariffs on some imports. In the end, though, the panel moderated that position and urged abolition “in concert with other advanced nations.”
Yet, the Okita group was itself internationalized to an extent without precedent in Japan. Businessmen from the United States, the Common Market, the Assn. of Southeast Asian Nations, Australia and South Korea were invited to present their views to the group on the questions at issue.
“In the process of internationalization,” the group said, “pains will occur. These pains, however, must be overcome by our efforts to become a leader in the international economy. . . . The age has arrived when our country must make sacrifices courageously and contribute positively to the international economic society.”
Will Japan make the sacrifices?
“That,” Okita said, “depends on how the government carries out the recommendations in this report.”
