Prime Minister--and Policy Proposals--Largely Ignored at Talks : Uno Scandal Forces Japan to Take Back Seat in Paris

Early in the annual seven-nation economic summit conference here, beleaguered Japanese Prime Minister Sosuke Uno walked into the Japanese press room for what he expected would be a welcome respite from the sex-for-pay scandal that threatens to topple him from power.

No sooner had Uno taken the podium, however, than he received a rude jolt from the usually loyal Japanese press corps.

“Well, Mr. Prime Minister,” the first questioner asked, “you’ve had only a fleeting meeting with President Bush, and French President Francois Mitterrand hardly saw you at all. You’ve been pretty unlucky here so far, haven’t you?”

So it has gone for Uno--and for Japan--at this year’s summit, which ended Sunday. At last year’s meeting in Toronto, Japan was the talk of the summit--the new economic colossus, exercising its muscle to influence Western political and economic affairs.

But this year Japan is a crippled giant, its prime minister embroiled in scandal and its political clout weakened. It has lost several key skirmishes in behind-the-scenes bargaining. Its new foreign aid measures have gone virtually unheralded. In many ways it has been all but ignored.

“The things we have proposed and done this year just have not been appreciated the way they once were,” conceded a Japanese veteran of several such summits. “The influence that we exhibited last year seems simply to have disappeared.”

The Unwanted Man

Uno himself has been the unwanted man. His private one-on-one meeting with Bush lasted just six minutes--unusually short for a session between leaders of two such close allies.

Mitterrand also gave him short shrift, citing the press of events--a virtually unprecedented snub. Even the pool reports filed by the journalists who were allowed in to view the seven leaders either overlooked him or treated him with mock respect.

More significantly, Japan’s diminished standing was apparent in the summit’s internal bargaining as well. Japan’s once-assertive Finance Ministry lost an effort to lard the final communique with stronger language on the need to keep the dollar’s value in line.

Tokyo sought vainly to toughen the communique’s language on the threat of worsening inflation. The other six, including U.S. Treasury Secretary Nicholas F. Brady, simply refused to go along.

And a Japanese effort to avoid participation in a summit-country consortium formed to provide new economic aid to Poland was caught and reversed.

“They definitely would have had more effect if their government had not been so weak,” said an American official who asked not to be named.

“It’s rather sad--they came with this big political weight, but it has all been counterbalanced by the weakness of the Uno government,” a senior Canadian diplomat said after watching the Japanese juggernaut grind to a halt.

The Japanese tried--vainly--to head off some of the adverse impact. “We are very much aware of this kind of allegation,” Taizo Watanabe, the Foreign Ministry’s official spokesman, conceded at a briefing Sunday.

Press Kits

Mindful of Uno’s new image problem as an accused philanderer, the ministry had distributed press kits replete with photos of Uno, his wife and grandchildren seated happily on a family-room sofa. It might well have been the Bushes posing with First Dog Millie in Kennebunkport, Me.

Diplomats reported that Uno himself tried to put the best face on the situation, even joking about his plight to the other heads of government. “He displayed what the French would call sang-froid (coolness under pressure),” one of them noted later.

Open to Western Media

And Japan’s press briefings, usually for the Japanese media only, this time were open to the Western media and conducted partly in English or French, so that foreign reporters could be assured that Tokyo was continuing to be a major player.

The embarrassment did not go unreported by the Japanese media, which uncharacteristically dwelt on the prime minister’s shortcomings. A throwaway line in a U.S. journalist’s report on one of the summit events--referring obliquely to the presence at the summit of “the long-suffering Mrs. Uno”--made front-page news in the Tokyo papers.

There was speculation, even here in Paris, that Uno might not remain in office much longer than it took for his flight to make it back to Tokyo.

One veteran Japanese observer noted that Kakuei Tanaka, a prime minister in the 1970s who was forced to step down after becoming embroiled in a scandal involving Lockheed Aircraft Co., had set a precedent at the time by refusing to resign from office while he was on foreign soil.

“It’s a good thing this summit is closing earlier than had been scheduled,” he said. “It will give Mr. Uno a chance to make sure he is home in case anything happens.”