THE SUMMIT IN TOKYO : ‘Sherpas’--Trusty Guides to Agreement

For the so-called sherpas, the key government aides who guide the leaders of the world’s seven leading industrialized democracies in the ascent to the economic summit, most of their work was done by the time the meeting began on Sunday.

It is the responsibility of these wordsmiths to hammer and polish the boilerplate prose of the communiques that will be released on the summit’s final day into such a smooth surface that they are almost perfectly harmless.

And like the Nepalese sherpa guides of Mt. Everest fame, they are also responsible for assuring as much as possible that no dangerous slips occur during these highly publicized events.

Months of Work

For months, the sherpas--usually senior diplomats from the State Department and the foreign ministries of the other summit nations--have been laboring to prepare the written communiques on political and economic issues that are at the center of the three-day meeting. When the summit ends on Tuesday, the leaders will issue with much fanfare a joint statement purporting to describe what they have accomplished here.

But much of that language was actually worked out weeks in advance.

By developing the draft statement well before the leaders meet, the sherpas help stake out initial positions, paper over disagreements and allow the leaders to devote more time to immediately pressing political issues.

Economics, in fact, has become kind of a stepchild at economic summits. In the 12 years that these summits have been held, the economic issues have become so routine and institutionalized that even most of the American reporters gathered here have lost interest in the substance of the meetings.

At the daily White House briefing before the first summit session Sunday, for example, not one question in the first 30 minutes was on the official agenda of the summit--such issues as trade protectionism, currency fluctuations, growth rates.

“Is there a summit in town?” quipped Larry Speakes, President Reagan’s spokesman, after reporters’ questions ranged from the Delta rocket explosion that occurred only hours before at Cape Canaveral to the tiny bit of radiation discovered in the local rain from the accident at the Soviet nuclear reactor at Chernobyl.

Few Issues in Dispute

The lack of interest in the economic issues ostensibly at the heart of this year’s summit is probably just fine with most of those involved. Unlike several past conferences, when the world economic situation was far bleaker than it is today, there are now only a few issues in dispute.

“During the preparatory process this year, I have been struck by the degree of agreement among the summit countries on basic economic issues,” said W. Allen Wallis, under secretary of state for economic affairs and the U.S. official who is “sherpaing” his fourth summit.

The apparent disinterest carried over to the beginning stages of the conference. At a briefing Sunday on the meeting between Reagan and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, a senior Administration official confessed that the two leaders didn’t mention economic issues during the hourlong session.

Despite all the careful preparation, of course, there are many aspects of the summit that the sherpas do not pretend to control.

Disaster on Agenda

At this summit, for instance, the Soviet nuclear plant disaster was immediately put on the agenda, primarily because it was relatively easy for the leaders to agree on the need to condemn the Soviets’ stonewalling on the disaster.

The summits are now far more unstructured than they once were, allowing the seven national leaders--along with the head of the European Economic Community--plenty of time to meet among themselves without aides.

Despite all the media attention given these annual rituals, “the very nature of a summit is not a newsmaking event,” insisted Wallis. “The more successful it really is, the less news it makes. The purpose is to exchange views, not to negotiate policy.”

Tokyo Wants Concessions

Nonetheless, real issues of substance do come up at the summits. The Japanese are desperate, for instance, to win some concessions from the United States and from European nations to stop the rapid appreciation of the yen. Their pleas appear to be falling on deaf ears, however.

But even when they are discussing such weighty matters, the leaders often find it easier to fall back on carefully honed phrases rather than venture out into a free-form debate.

In the last two summits, for instance, a favorite word of American officials was one that they had to invent-- snimog. Snimog, it turns out, stands for “sustained non-inflationary market-oriented growth.”

It is a phrase that has cropped up in the final statements of the recent summits, and it is likely, officials confessed, that it--or something like it--will appear in the final communique this time, too.

That’s because, in the end, the leaders must always produce some sort of statement to conclude the conference. After all, one official felt compelled to say, “It is an economic summit, we must remember.”