Bush Bringing Home Little From Tokyo Quest for Jobs : Trade: Although he calls the trip a success, his aides and business executives are disappointed with the results.

President Bush headed home today with little to show for a four-day crusade in Japan in which his proclaimed quest for “jobs, jobs, jobs” won a cordial hearing but a less-than-eager reply from the Japanese.

“You never get all you want,” Bush conceded, while proclaiming his trip a success. But other Administration officials made it clear that the White House is less than satisfied by the details of a U.S.-Japan accord announced here Thursday.

“It’s somewhere between acceptable and a disappointment,” a White House official said.

And business executives accompanying the President were glum about what the Bush trip accomplished.

About the best thing that Bush aides could say about what the President had achieved in Tokyo was that he had delivered his message to Japan. But not for several months, a senior official said, “will we have some sense of whether that message will be better received.”

Bush on Thursday was apparently still feeling the lingering effects of stomach flu that caused him to vomit, faint and collapse Wednesday evening at an official dinner. He leaned on a table at a press conference and seemed fatigued. But he was mentally sharp and joked that “even Democrats get the flu.”

As he sought throughout the day to minimize the severity of his collapse, he insisted that he had suffered from no more than a “24-hour bug” and called it “this little tiny bout of flu.”

But White House officials reported Thursday that the President was not eating solid food, and Bush looked wan and was less than steady on his feet Thursday night at a state dinner at the Imperial Palace. Bush delivered only a short toast; the dinner was abbreviated, in deference to the President’s illness.

It emerged Thursday that the only photographs of Bush’s collapse--from a videotape by the Japanese television network NHK--were shot by an unmanned camera that had been left running during the dinner in apparent violation of an agreement with the Japanese government.

A Foreign Ministry official said the government has protested to NHK in “quite strong terms,” and Taizo Watanabe, the ministry’s chief spokesman, could be heard before a press conference apologizing to White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater for “the pictures.”

But so troubling were those photographs of a President slumped, slack-jawed, in his chair that the five minutes Bush spent on the floor of the prime minister’s residence here could prove more important than any other moment of his four-nation trip.

“The image is burned” into the mind of the public, a White House official said.

Meantime, the President also must confront the reality that, in an election year made difficult by an economic slump at home, his Asian visit had yielded relatively little good financial news. While Bush had promised voters that his top priority would be to create markets and American jobs, he came home with mostly empty pockets.

To be sure, a Japanese “action plan” issued Thursday as a product of talks between the two nations will allow candidate Bush to cite concessions made by Japan under his pressure. The most significant: Japan’s agreement to double its purchases of U.S. auto parts to about $19 billion by fiscal 1994.

Bush said that deal and other voluntary import proposals make a difference of “many billions of dollars” and will “make it clear that the (U.S.) message has been received.”

But those commitments represented only a modest increase over what Tokyo had promised in an anxious run-up to this week’s trade showdown. And Bush failed to win the broader commitment he had sought for Tokyo to open its markets and significantly reduce its trade deficit with the United States.

Some of the American business executives accompanying Bush also appeared unconvinced. Chrysler Chairman Lee Iacocca scoffed at Toyota’s agreement, as part of the pact, to increase its sales in Japan of U.S.-made cars by 20,000 in 1994. “It doesn’t sound like a lot of cars,” he said.

Harold A. Poling, chairman of Ford Motor Co., added, “The bad news is that I think the proposals that are on the table as far as the auto industry is concerned are inadequate.”

Joseph T. Gorman, chairman of auto parts maker TRW Inc., observed: “We agreed that there is no agreement. Is it enough? Of course it’s not enough.”

And John P. Reilly, president of Tenneco Automotive, a worldwide producer of auto parts, complained: “There was some progress but it was definitely insufficient.”

Seeking to put the best face on the outcome of the trip, Administration officials stressed that the concessions extracted earlier from Japan represented marked progress. But White House officials had made plain throughout the talks that they expect Japan to agree to further steps during the meeting itself. They acknowledged that their failure to do so represents a setback.

Among those described by aides as “particularly unhappy” was outgoing Commerce Secretary Robert A. Mosbacher, who had played “bad cop” for the Americans in the trade talks and whose attention has already begun to shift to his new duties as general chairman of Bush’s reelection effort.

Apparently because of Bush’s illness, the White House canceled two of three events today at which he had been scheduled to outline the achievements of his trip. But within the traveling White House there was little sense of opportunity missed. While Bush was to deliver a statement on arrival in Washington this morning, one official said, “We really don’t have all that much more to say.”

SUMMIT A STANDOFF: Tokyo talks reflected growing U.S.-Japan differences. D1