‘The Group of 2’ : Japan Foresees a Joint Global Role With U.S.

For more than 15 years, the United States has been urging Japan to play a larger role in world affairs. For nearly as long, Japan has been agreeing that it ought to do so.

But Thursday’s meeting in Washington between President Bush and Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita marked the first time that leaders of the two nations have been able to get down to brass tacks on what may be, at last, a new Japanese willingness to share some of the world’s burdens with the United States.

Takeshita, whose nation’s aid has been focused on Asia, repeated pledges by earlier Japanese leaders to broaden the scope of official economic assistance to include Latin America and Africa. He said Japan wants to cooperate with the United States in the Middle East. He said he wants to make a regular practice of U.S.-Japan policy coordination on issues ranging from relations with the Soviet Union to global environment problems.

And, in his remarks to reporters after the meeting, Takeshita called not only for cooperation but also for “joint operations” with the United States on global issues.

As a Foreign Ministry official accompanying him put it before leaving Tokyo, it is increasingly “the Group of 2”--the United States and Japan--that exercises a decisive influence on world events.

“Our bilateral relationship,” he said, “has assumed a global dimension.”

Takeshita’s declaration of willingness to assume a global responsibility--Bush Administration officials expressed surprise at the forcefulness of the message--represented a growing, but still limited, confidence that has emerged in Japan along with its new status as the world’s leading creditor nation.

Unlike the past, Japan is now putting its money where formerly only its mouth had been. This year, it is expected to surpass the United States as the world’s No. 1 economic aid donor.

Irritated by U.S. Inaction

Takeshita’s performance in Washington also came against a background of growing irritation among both Japanese officials and business leaders with America’s seeming inability to cope with its own problems, ranging from narcotics to its huge budget deficit.

But as viewed through Japanese eyes, it did not amount to a demand for the United States to yield a portion of its global leadership.

In Tokyo on Friday, Chief Cabinet Secretary Keizo Obuchi issued a special statement calling the meeting “the start of new cooperation between Japan and the United States.” But rather than point to new leadership by Japan, Obuchi cited Bush’s commitment to maintain the United States’ position as a global power “making efforts for peace, democracy and justice,” and said it would be Japan’s role to support “these American efforts.”

As Takeshita told Bush directly, “No country can replace the role of the United States. We want America to be strong, to be an ally we can trust most of all.”

Japanese reaction was summed up by the Asahi newspaper, which complained in an analysis that Takeshita’s declarations would “strengthen even further (Japan’s) complementary role in the global strategy of the United States.”

Takeshita also followed the path of his predecessors in failing to propose any initiatives of his own, a trait that has irked a series of Washington administrations dating back at least to 1973.

In July of that year, then-Secretary of State William P. Rogers astonished Japanese officials by publicly praising a rare initiative that Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka had proposed six months earlier, but almost immediately dropped.

Rogers, who had been urging Japan to assume greater responsibility for peace and stability in Asia, chose to support Tanaka’s abandoned idea for a pan-Pacific conference to discuss rehabilitation of the war-ravaged Indochina peninsula simply because he wanted to encourage some Japanese initiative, a senior U.S. official said at the time. Although already a dead letter, the Tanaka idea was the only one he could find, the official explained.

Japanese leaders, particularly former Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone, have tried for years to focus meetings with American leaders on global issues, but each time they found themselves overwhelmed with bilateral trade and economic disputes.

Only 13 months ago, Takeshita, making his first Washington trip as prime minister, pledged to lend $4 billion to Latin America, a region of key interest to the United States. Hardly anyone noticed. A shopping list of four specific American trade complaints drew all the attention.

Trade took a back seat in the Bush-Takeshita meeting if only because the Bush Administration hasn’t had time to draw up its own trade agenda with Japan. Takeshita’s disposal of last year’s complaints and a slight reduction in the U.S. deficit with Japan in 1988, the first in nine years, also took some of the heat out of the trade issue.

From the Japanese view, Takeshita adopted a posture that appeared self-effacing.

“It is often said of me that I am slow in reaching decisions, but what I promise, I always carry out,” Takeshita told Bush. “From now on, I want to speed up my decision-making.”

That Takeshita even went to Washington struck a note of sankin-kotai --trips of obeisance that daimyo lords paid to shogun leaders during Japan’s feudal era. A regular session of Parliament, which normally would have convened as soon as the government formulated the fiscal 1989 budget, was postponed for more than two weeks so that Takeshita could make the trip.

Third World Debt Plan

Takeshita also refrained from reiterating the so-called “Miyazawa plan” for solving Third World debt, a rare Japanese initiative that his former Finance Minister Kiichi Miyazawa put on the table at the Toronto summit of seven leading industrialized nations last summer. Despite the repeated American calls for a more active Japanese role in world affairs, U.S. officials rejected Miyazawa’s proposal out of hand.

Before leaving Tokyo, diplomats who accompanied Takeshita said Japan planned to wait to see what new ideas the Bush Administration might propose on the debt issue.

A provocative remark on Jan. 25 by Defense Secretary-designate John Tower, who condemned as “a lousy idea” the decision to include in Japan’s postwar constitution a ban on maintaining military forces, was publicly ignored by Takeshita. Instead, he assigned his foreign minister, Sosuke Uno, to lodge a mild complaint with Secretary of State James A. Baker III.

Tower’s statement, Uno said, “caused a big reaction in Japan. Prudence is needed in handling how we move forward with cooperation in defense.”

It was a far more restrained reaction than could have been expected from the U.S. government if a high Japanese official had called a major element of the American Constitution “a lousy idea.”

And compared with irritations expressed among working-level government officials and some businessmen about the persistent American budget deficits, Takeshita’s reference to that problem could only be described as mild.

“The United States complained about our tariff levels. So we lowered them. Then the United States complained about the (yen-dollar) exchange rate. So we corrected that. Then, the United States complained about our economic structure. So we are changing that,” one senior Foreign Ministry official said. “Now, it’s time for Americans to recognize that something’s wrong on their side.”

As far back as 1973, President Richard M. Nixon, in welcoming Tanaka on a visit to Washington, called the United States and Japan “equal partners.” Tanaka, however, declared that Japan “had no thought whatsoever of standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the United States.”

Takeshita’s performance did not yet bring Japan up to a shoulder-to-shoulder level. But it did amount to a declaration of intent to take some of the weight off America’s back--in exchange for closer consultations on how the load should be handled.