Uno Declares He’s Not an Interim Leader : Will Seek Reelection in 5 Months as Head of Japan’s Ruling Party

Prime Minister Sosuke Uno declared Saturday that “my Cabinet is not an interim Cabinet” and said he will seek reelection when his term of only five months as ruling party president expires.

By tradition, the party presidency is a requirement for holding the post of prime minister.

“I am not an offshoot of (the faction of former Prime Minister Yasuhiro) Nakasone,” declared the former Nakasone lieutenant. Nor, he added, does he intend to serve as a “bridge” between the government of former Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita, who virtually single-handedly picked him, and any future administration of Shintaro Abe, a factional leader close to Takeshita, as Japanese analysts have predicted.

And, while praising both of his predecessors, he declared: “I’ll do it my own way.”

Takeshita, who stepped down Friday, as well as Nakasone, Abe and other strongmen of the party all have been tainted by an influence-buying scandal that has crippled Japanese politics.

Uno, the first Liberal Democratic prime minister in 34 years to take office without a power base of his own, made the statements with a surprisingly forceful display of self-confidence in a nationally televised 80-minute news conference, his first after being elected prime minister Friday.

He said he intends to make his Cabinet one whose accomplishments “will be evaluated” by the time his term as party president expires Oct. 31. He is now filling out the remainder of Takeshita’s term. If reelected, he would serve two additional years.

On trade frictions with the United States, Uno declared flatly that he would refuse to negotiate any demand that Japan open up its rice market to imports.

He also complained that the American people do not realize how much Japan already is buying from the United States.

“Japan increased its imports from the United States by $10 billion last year,” he said. “That sum is the equivalent of all of America’s exports to France for a whole year.”

(U.S. Commerce Department statistics show that the exact figure for the one-year increase in American exports to Japan in 1988 was $9.5 billion.)

Uno said that he had told then-Secretary of State George P. Shultz, after the United States and Japan had settled “a whole host of issues” last year, that “if you bring up rice on top of all these problems, that’s the end! Japan and the United States are allies. Any argument between Japan and the United States is bad for the stability of the world economy.”

He and Shultz agreed, he said, that Japan will put its rice policy on the negotiating table in the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations “when all 95 nations who are members of GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) put their agricultural policies on the table.”

Therefore, he emphasized, rice “will not become an issue between Japan and the United States.”

Uno enumerated a list of new moves designed to combat what he called the public’s “distrust of politics” in general and of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, in particular. They included:

-- A pledge to “correct the bad points” of a highly unpopular 3% consumption tax that was implemented April 1.

-- A decision to require Cabinet ministers to announce assets listed in the names of their family members, in addition to their own, both when they are appointed and when they step down.

-- Establishment of a “political reform headquarters” that would be headed by a vice president of the ruling party, or by himself “if an appropriate person cannot be found” to undertake the job.