This Hard-Line Negotiator Speaks Language of Trade

He speaks Japanese skillfully, eats sushi with his fingers--”the way you’re supposed to”--and is fascinated by the Orient. At home, his living room is filled with Japanese paintings and red lacquer storage chests.

Yet no one has ever branded Joseph A. Massey a member of the Chrysanthemum Club--the epithet that Japan’s Washington critics have coined for government officials who “go easy” on Tokyo.

To the contrary, Massey, an assistant U.S. trade representative and one of the government’s most experienced trade negotiators, is known as a “hawk”--aggressive, openly skeptical and intent on closing every loophole in dealing with Japan.

And over the past few weeks, Massey, a 49-year-old former professor with a graying, well-trimmed beard and an occasional wry smile, has been involved in crucial negotiations over how to resolve key trade disputes with Japan.

“You would not call Joe a dove,” says Clyde Prestowitz, a onetime Commerce Department trade official and the author of “Trading Places,” a book that criticizes U.S. trade policy toward Japan. “That doesn’t mean he’s unreasonable--but he is a firm negotiator.”

Under the 1988 Trade Act, the Administration has completed negotiations it began last year to open Japan’s market to more supercomputers, satellites and wood products. Broader economic talks aimed at helping U.S. businesses operate more successfully there are going on this week in Tokyo, with Massey part of the U.S. negotiating team.

“To get real access to the Japanese market means it has to operate the way other markets do,” Massey says. “And that’s going to take a substantial reform in how the Japanese do business.” At present, Japanese markets are dominated by interlocking business relationships that too often tend to shut out newcomers, particularly foreigners.

When Massey joined the government in 1982, he was virtually the only key U.S. trade representative official who was able to speak Japanese or was a specialist in U.S. trade frictions with Tokyo. The Commerce Department had one such specialist, the State Department a few more.

Today, the U.S. trade representative’s office has some half a dozen officials and staffers who have experience in Japan, including S. Linn Williams, a deputy to Trade Representative Carla Anderson Hills and Massey’s boss. And Massey is now one of three who speak Japanese.

To his delight, the United States’ approach to U.S.-Japanese trade negotiations also has changed dramatically, particularly since last July, when the Bush Administration began its broad-scale Structural Impediments Initiative talks with Tokyo.

Earlier in Massey’s tenure, Washington believed that broad economic factors would correct any trade problems with Japan. U.S. negotiators worried mostly about tariffs and quotas, removal of which turned out to have relatively little impact on trade patterns.

But today--largely because of rising U.S.-Japan trade tensions--Tokyo has become the major focus of U.S. trade policy, and the Bush Administration has been seeking not just to reduce tariffs there but to alter the fundamental way that Japan does business.

Although Massey was not directly involved in the SII talks--Williams has been the U.S. trade representative’s key negotiator in those--he has participated in virtually all U.S. trade negotiations with Japan since the early 1980s.

“We’re now moving into a new phase with the Japanese in which we are dealing with important issues that simply couldn’t be addressed” under the previous, narrower negotiating format.

Born in Villanova, Pa., Massey earned a doctorate in political science from Yale University, taught U.S.-Japanese relations at Dartmouth for a decade and spent two years at a Boston-based consulting firm. His service here includes a year on the White House staff.

He has lived in Japan, on and off, for six years. An amateur bird-watcher, he combined the two passions in 1982 to write “A Field Guide to the Birds of Japan”--a book that describes winged creatures in the Japanese islands, not fellow trade negotiators he has met.

Massey’s trade “credits” include some of the most contentious negotiations the two nations have undertaken--aimed at lifting Japanese trade barriers on beef, citrus, tobacco, telecommunications equipment and, more recently, supercomputers and satellites.

His most memorable experience was in 1986, during wrangling over an accord involving semiconductors. After round-the-clock bargaining for four days, U.S. officials staged an eleventh-hour walkout that left their Japanese counterparts taken aback--and ready to give in.

The semiconductor agreement that was supposed to open new opportunities for U.S. manufacturers and stop Japan from predatory pricing “has done a poor job,” he says, “but it taught us a lot.”

In terms of the over-all conduct of trade negotiations with Japan, says Prestowitz: “The discussion is carried on at a much more sophisticated level now, and I think Joe has had something to do with that. He has had an impact.”