Ex-Governor Setting Out Vision of Future : Brown in Japan to Write and Reflect

Former Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. is leading a mostly reclusive existence in this seaside city of Buddhist temples and samurai history 25 miles south of Tokyo as he writes a book he hopes will put him back into the political limelight.

Brown, found here Monday after hours of searching, said he has completed several hundred pages of the untitled and unsold manuscript. He described his aim as “to better understand and articulate my philosophy . . . and to ultimately set out my vision of the future.”

Interviewed for three hours in a tea shop, Brown--who has grown a beard--said he left Los Angeles in late August because there were too many distractions from the writing process and that he is spending most of his time here writing in a small apartment with a word processor.

But, it was learned, the 48-year-old former governor has also been attending Zen Buddhist study sessions and meditations directed by Kyozo Yamada, a teacher and hospital director, in Yamada’s residence here.

Brown refused to discuss these and other “private” activities. Asked about his Buddhist studies, he responded, “I’m studying the culture, and I’ve read a number of books, but I don’t know that I want to discuss my own personal religious practices, which obviously is something important to me.”

He noted that he remains a practicing Roman Catholic.

Nor would he discuss reports that a former longtime aide, Jacques Barzaghi, and Barzaghi’s son have been living with him here.

He alluded only indirectly to reports that his landlord refused to renew a four-month lease he had on a pleasant duplex just up the street from the Hokoku-ji Buddhist temple here, saying he had moved to an apartment.

Healthy and Happy

Despite such contretemps, however, Brown appeared happy and in excellent health. He remarked, “I’ve not been sick a day since I came to Japan.”

He was accompanied during the interview by Nadja Krylev, a former special assistant to him in the governor’s office, who said she was visiting him for a week.

Brown was found only after exhaustive inquiries with police and other authorities in this city. Finally, a policeman in the third neighborhood visited directed Times reporters to the home of Yamada.

Although the Buddhist teacher’s daughter-in-law said Brown found reporters to be troublesome, she finally summoned a German “intermediary” for the former governor and, after inspecting the reporters’ business cards, he abruptly said Brown would be at the Kamakura railroad station at 2 p.m., 20 minutes later. The intermediary did not identify himself.

Staying Out of Reach

Brown repeatedly asked how he had been discovered. Asked at one point whether, in general, he was reachable, he responded, “No, I’m not. I talk to my law firm (Reavis & McGrath of Los Angeles), but that’s about it.

“I can be reached, but I prefer not to be,” Brown added a moment later. “I’m easily accessible if I choose to be.”

Brown readily commented at length on world, national and state affairs.

He called for new commitments to disciplined education of American youth, to allow the United States to compete more effectively with Japan and other advanced industrialized countries.

He was critical of the Reagan Administration for not pursuing more imaginatively what he termed a major opportunity that he sees opening up for arms control and other agreements with the Soviet Union under the leadership of Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

Reference to Court

And he remarked acerbically that it “may take years, not just months” to see what all the fallout will be for the California Supreme Court after the ouster by voters in November of Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird and two of Brown’s other appointees.

Brown said he had breakfast with Bird on a brief Christmas visit home to California and that he has no regrets that he appointed her to the high court.

The California electorate, in ousting the justices, was “certainly (in) a restless mood,” he remarked. “I noticed the same thing was done in South Carolina--three justices were removed. What it seemed to be (in California) was a referendum on the death penalty and Californians have voted again and again that they want that death penalty.”

It wasn’t just Rose Bird, Brown suggested.

“I have a hunch that if other people had been there, they could have been thrown out just as easily. Perhaps it wouldn’t have been quite the same way, but the result would have been equivalent.”

Notes Earlier Tendency

What some Californians have not noticed, Brown said, is that the state Supreme Court has been hesitant to apply the death penalty since the days of Gov. Goodwin J. Knight, and it was a Reagan appointee as chief justice, the late Donald Wright, who on two occasions had struck down the death penalty altogether.

Brown said he had practiced a little law on behalf of his Los Angeles firm while in Japan and had taken two trips each to China and Hong Kong.

Brown said income from investments has supplemented what he has made from legal work.

In China on both trips, he said, he had lengthy discussions with Hu Qili, a Politburo member and permanent secretary of the Communist Party Central Committee’s secretariat, about the future course of Chinese communism.

“We talked a lot about religious freedom and the role that the exercise of religious freedom has in a modern state, what that means to China and what it means to other countries that are dealing with China,” Brown recalled. “And I emphasized to him that I thought it was very, very important that China show greater tolerance for people within China, particularly those that have run into difficulty because of their practice of religion. There are a number of Catholics that have had difficulty there and I spoke for them.”

Most of the time since August, however, Brown said, he has been devoting his full working hours to writing his book.

Look at Experiences

“What I’m doing is writing first for myself,” Brown explained. “I’m comprehensively looking at my experience, both in politics and before, trying to understand more deeply the principles that best describe what I’ve tried to do in politics.”

Asked then if the book is autobiographical, Brown said, “In the first instance, but how I edit it finally and how much of that I leave in really remains to be seen, because I want to ultimately set out my vision of the future, based on the principles that I’ve tried to follow in politics and trying to get a deeper grasp on what are the most essential points in what I’ve brought to political life, and then to match that with what is most important in contemporary politics today. So, it’s really a wider perspective on governing and the role of America in the world, but as that perspective emerges out of my own concrete experience.”

Brown said he has not looked for a publisher yet, because “I want to complete the project and then take a completed project to publishers.”

Asked if the book and the self-searching was pointing toward a reentry into political life, Brown replied:

“I’m certainly not shutting off any doors to the future, but I don’t have a direct path that I can give to you at this moment in time.”

Not Sure of Path

“I haven’t given up my interest,” he said at the end of the interview. “I want to finish this book. I then want to take it on the lecture circuit, and I expect to give a number of speeches, but where that leads, I just can’t tell.”

He said he could not even say at this point whether the book would appear before the 1988 election. “They say it takes nine months to publish these things after you actually present them to the publisher,” he said.

Brown declared that his experience of living in Japan had strengthened his conviction that “the competitive edge of American society” must be improved by strengthening the schools and developing more disciplined, challenged young people.

“People work very hard here,” he said of the Japanese. “I also learned here there’s an incredible pressure placed on the young people, on the students. Not only do they have to go to school in a very rigorous program, but they also go to cram schools. Half the students, beginning in grammar school, go to the juku, or cram, schools. And in fact there’s various tiers of cram schools and some people have to go to a second-tier cram school in order to go to first-tier cram school, to get in a junior high school, to be able to get into a very good high school, in order to get into a good university. . . . There’s a lot of forced feeding.”

Tougher Standards

If Americans are going to be able to keep up, the standards in schools in the United States have to be toughened, he said. “More science, more math, more language, tougher requirements all the way down the line. . . . Whatever the costs and whatever the problems in terms of public funding, America has to make a much greater commitment in education, in working, retraining and in our level of public and private research.”

Brown, however, was vague on the question of whether taxes would have to be raised to pay for this. He remarked that in California revenues have increased substantially since he left the governor’s office and that perhaps it is a matter of restraining the growth of other items in the budget while giving the extra money to education.

As for American-Soviet relations, Brown said:

“I think there’s a real opportunity. . . . As I see it, the challenge from our friends who are economic competitors is almost as great, if not as great, as the challenge from our historic adversary, the Soviet Union, and we are draining away our scientific and governmental resources, focusing on the narrow challenge of Soviet-American relations while we are paralyzed in face of the trade deficit and the severe competition coming from throughout the rest of the world.”

Soviet Stance Seen

Brown said he believes “the Soviet Union is at least holding out the possibility of serious, sharp reductions in nuclear weapons. It’s obvious that a nuclear test ban could be had for the asking.”

The Reagan Administration, he said, should move more enthusiastically toward an agreement with the Soviets “on the medium-range missiles in Europe, a comprehensive test ban treaty . . . and at the same time we ought to engage the Soviets in a long-term relationship such as a joint mission in outer space that would take several decades to complete, but which would bind us together in an area that is new and not enmeshed in our old conflicts.”

Brown was caustic about the record of the Reagan Administration.

“Reagan has talked about the Reagan revolution, which has consisted of reducing some taxes and building up the military, running up a big deficit and thereby stimulating the economy, but when people reflect on it, they’re going to see that there was not that much of that revolution,” he said.

Now that it’s winding to a close, “people are going to be looking toward a more active public leadership,” he predicted.

At the end of the interview, Brown expressed reluctance at having his picture taken with his white-tinged beard, but he finally acceded with apparent good humor. For the pictures, he stood unsmiling, his piercing eyes looking forward in the darkness. Then he said goodby and, with Krylev, turned to walk hastily up the street.