The World - News from July 26, 1988

A Japanese politician apologized for remarks he made implying that American blacks have no qualms about declaring bankruptcy. Michio Watanabe, chief of the governing Liberal Democratic Party’s Policy Affairs Research Council, issued a statement apologizing for his “misleading and inadvertent” comments. Watanabe, in a speech Saturday at the party’s summer retreat, said: “(Americans) use credit cards a lot. They have no savings, so they go bankrupt.” He added that, while most Japanese consider bankruptcy humiliating, “ . . . among those guys over there (in the United States) are a lot of blacks and so on who would think without concern, ‘We’re bankrupt. Now we don’t have to pay anything back.’ ”