3 Rivals for Japanese Premiership Assess U.S. Frictions

The three men hoping to succeed outgoing Prime Minister Sosuke Uno offered three different solutions Saturday to Japan’s economic frictions with the United States.

They ranged from better explanations to Washington of actions Japan already is taking to a get-tough-with-America approach.

The likely winner, former Education Minister Toshiki Kaifu, 58, suggested better explanations. He said that the United States has failed to understand the improvements Japan is achieving.

Blaming part of American criticism of Japan on what he called “emotional” arguments, Kaifu said that Japan’s surplus in its trade with the United States is gradually declining as a result of increasing domestic demand in Japan.

“We should fully explain to the United States the efforts we are making to restructure our economy,” he told a nationally televised news conference that brought him together with his two opponents for the post of president of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party.

The new leader, to be elected in a caucus Tuesday, is expected to be chosen prime minister Wednesday by the lower house of Parliament, in which the Liberal Democrats hold a 38-seat majority.

Kaifu and his two opponents completed procedures Saturday to run in the party race.

Selection of the new leader is regarded as crucial to the ability of the perennial ruling party to retain control of the government in the wake of its first-ever defeat in an upper house election July 23. An election for the lower house, which elects the prime minister, must be held by next July.

Former Welfare Minister Yoshiro Hayashi, 62, said that a “free trade agreement,” as proposed by former U.S. envoy Mike Mansfield, is “one possibility” to ease frictions with the United States.

But whatever the final form, “a new overall approach to carry out discussions encompassing not only trade but also exchange rates, finance issues and other problems is necessary,” he said.

The get-tough-with-America approach was proposed by Shintaro Ishihara, 56, a hawkish novelist turned politician who is likely to be an also-ran in the caucus election.

Ishihara singled out Makoto Kuroda, a former deputy vice minister for international affairs of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, as the ideal kind of “tough and cool” negotiator Japan should have to deal with America.

“Why? Because he clearly said ‘no’ (to America). With him, for the first time, normal negotiations of equality became possible with the United States,” Ishihara said.

He called for Japan to emulate the European Community by standing up to U.S. demands for an opening of Japan’s agricultural markets.

“There is no argument so simplistic as to put all of the blame upon Japan for the accumulation of black ink in Japan’s trade. For instance, bad (American) manufacturing supervision, the lack of marketing ideas and poor quality goods (also are to blame),” he said.

Ishihara also said that the Japanese government should have independently developed its new fighter jet, dubbed the FSX, instead of accepting an American proposal for joint development that has been criticized by the U.S. Congress.

“The FSX Japan wanted to make would have been an epochal, defensive fighter plane, but this was changed (to joint development). . . . Why does Japan have to swallow this kind of thing? If we had developed the plane by ourselves, we would have been able to have established real deterrent power. . . . But, in the end, we bowed to what America said.

“Is this diplomacy? Nobody could evaluate this (the FSX negotiations) as a diplomatic negotiation,” he said.

All three of the candidates, however, rejected any opening of Japan’s rice market to imports.

Rice, Hayashi said, “is a religious issue in Japan.”

“You can’t change Japanese Buddhism. . . . It would be the same thing as asking the United States to change its Christianity,” he said.

On domestic issues--and what they agreed is a “crisis” facing the ruling party--the three candidates voiced few differences. All three promised revisions in an unpopular 3% consumption tax that was put into effect April 1.