Mansfield Urges Congress, Japan to Eliminate Strains in Trade Ties
U.S. Ambassador Mike Mansfield lashed out at both the U.S. Congress and Japan on Friday, urging both to “get away from rhetoric and get down to reality” in an effort to solve “new, dangerous, very serious strains in our trade relations.”
At the same time, the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry assailed a U.S. decision made Thursday in Washington to pursue a complaint filed against Japanese semiconductor manufacturers.
Mansfield, speaking at the National Press Club, criticized Congress for proposing “more protectionist bills . . . than we have seen in 50 years.” He also criticized Americans in general for singling out Japan as the cause of America’s global trade deficit.
He said that nobody in the United States mentions the United States’ trade deficit with other countries--$20.4 billion last year with Canada, $18 billion with Latin America, $16.9 billion with Western Europe and $11.1 billion with Taiwan. All of these deficits, he said, are increasing at a faster pace than the deficit with Japan, which reached $36.9 billion last year.
U.S. Partly to Blame
“We cannot simply blame Japan for our trade problem because the problem is worldwide,” Mansfield said. “While we press Japan to open its markets, we must also look at the motes in our eyes and realize that much of the deficit is of our own making. What we in the United States need is less hand-wringing and more initiative to solve this and other problems.”
Among “other problems,” Mansfield listed Congress’ refusal to lift a ban on exports of surplus Alaskan oil and “our antiquated antitrust laws (that) often inhibit cooperation among American companies and hamper their ability to compete in the international marketplace.”
“The large Japanese trading companies play a key role in acquiring market shares for Japanese goods abroad,” he said, “yet much of what they do would probably be illegal for American companies.”
The Ministry of International Trade and Industry said in a statement that the complaint dealing with semiconductors, which was filed by the U.S. Semiconductor Industry Assn., was unreasonable and based on erroneous assumptions.
“The decision by the U.S. government may unfavorably affect not only our cooperative relations in the semiconductor field but also the harmonization of the trade relationship between the two countries,” the statement said.
It denied the American group’s charge that the Japanese had engaged in unfair trade practices in the semiconductor field. It added that “the Japanese semiconductor market has the most open structure of any in the world.”
