Japan’s Kaifu Blinks (Thankfully)

It’s to be hoped that the American public will emit a genuine sigh of relief over the news of the breakthrough in the stalled and tense U.S.-Japanese trade talks. They had threatened to place relations between the two countries on a perilous collision course that might even have resulted down the road in a frightening strategic realignment. But Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu appears to want none of that and neither does President Bush. Both leaders are to be commended for their investment of personal diplomacy that seems to have produced a very significant new trade understanding.

The trade and economic reforms to which the Kaifu government agreed Thursday are aimed at dismantling the Asian Berlin Wall that has stood in the way of a more normal trade partnership. This abnormality--with its artificial barriers to trade--in part has accounted for the nearly $50-billion annual trade deficit that worries so many Americans.

This is not the end of the negotiation: What was agreed to was a series of interim measures that will be reviewed, and presumably enhanced, in July. Nor does it mean the end of the U.S. trade deficit: As our Japanese friends rightly contend, many of America’s economic problems stem from economic failures here at home, not from evildoing by trading partners abroad. But Kaifu’s wise and timely compromise may help shift the focus to the problems of the U.S. budget deficit, inadequate productivity and product quality, the deteriorating public education system and so on. And that shift of atten tion would be in America’s interests as well as Japan’s.