Kaifu Presents a Blueprint to Enrich Life for Japanese : Trade: His plan emphasizes increased domestic spending. It mirrors steps urged by U.S. negotiators to increase Japan’s imports.

Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu, saying that talks with the United States aimed at removing impediments to trade are “the most urgent and important topic” on Japan’s agenda, today presented a sweeping blueprint to enrich life for the Japanese people.

His proposals in a speech to Parliament mirrored steps urged by U.S. trade negotiators as ways to increase Japanese consumer spending and thus Japanese imports.

Kaifu, who is scheduled to depart tonight for two days of meetings with President Bush in Palm Springs, enumerated a host of new proposals and promises stressing for the first time consumer welfare and daily life.

“The solution of U.S.-Japan trade and economic problems,” he told Parliament, “is the greatest policy issue our nation faces, and as part of that issue, the Structural Impediments Initiative talks rank as the most urgent and important topic.”

The speech appeared to affirm the high-level political support in Japan that American negotiators say is needed to push to a successful conclusion a yearlong series of trade talks called the Structural Impediments Initiative. Bush has made them the centerpiece of his economic policy toward Japan on grounds that they are a key to higher Japanese consumption and foreign purchases.

It also showed a politically invigorated Kaifu, fresh from an unexpectedly solid victory in the Feb. 18 election for the lower house of Parliament. Until today, the 59-year-old leader, plucked from obscurity last August in the aftermath of scandals and an upper house election defeat for the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, had offered no major new policy initiatives.

Overseas, Kaifu declared, Japan will use its economic power, technological skills and experience to participate in the creation of a new world order.

At home, he pledged to create “a fair society in which affluence of the heart can be achieved” by enriching daily living, solving land and housing problems and correcting discrepancies between prices at home and abroad.

Japanese, Kaifu complained, “endure too much study when they are children, too much work when they are adults and too much time when they are retired.” Women, he added, bear too much of the burden of child-rearing and caring for the aged.

As a first step, he announced what he called a “10-year strategy to promote health and welfare for the aged” that would seek to reduce the number of bedridden to zero while vastly expanding health and welfare facilities and increasing the number of home helpers for the aged.

He also promised more child-care facilities to enable women to use their talents equally with men and said he would expand employment opportunities for older workers up to the age of 65.

A fund to support the arts and culture also will be set up, he said.

Kaifu promised to draw up a reform of real estate taxes in fiscal 1990, which begins April 1; apply residential tax rates to farmland in large cities in fiscal 1992 to increase the supply of land for homes; build 1 million living units in the Tokyo area in the next 10 years; rationalize the distribution system; strictly enforce the Anti-Monopoly Law, and reduce working hours.

All of the promises matched reforms that U.S. negotiators have urged Japan to embrace in the trade talks.

Administration officials insist that prohibitive land costs, inadequate housing and high prices impede business and hinder spending on consumer goods and imports.

Last Friday, S. Linn Williams, deputy U.S. trade representative, accused Kaifu of failing to provide “political guidance” to his negotiators at the Structural Impediments Initiative talks.

Kaifu today praised the talks, in which each country is suggesting reforms in the other. He said they will contribute both to the improvement of the quality of life in Japan and the strengthening of competitive power in the United States. He added that they “are directly linked to the strengthening of cooperative relations between our countries.”

“I shall exert my utmost effort for progress in these talks,” he pledged.

He warned his own people in the nationally televised speech that the world’s economic order is “standing at a turning point, with the growth of protectionism threatening the existence of the global free trading system.”

He pledged to maintain growth led by domestic demand, improve market access for imports and enact a new system giving tax breaks to importers of foreign goods. He added an appeal to both enterprises and individuals to join the government in promoting imports.

Kaifu and his entourage are scheduled to arrive in Los Angeles this afternoon to change planes en route to Palm Springs. During the 25 hours Kaifu will be in Palm Springs, he and Bush are scheduled to spend nearly seven hours together in meetings and over meals.