That’s All, Miyazawa Says of Concessions

After making new trade concessions to the United States, Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa said in an interview aired Saturday that the latest agreements represent the limit of what his country can do to even out its huge trade imbalance with the United States.

The statement came as the Bush Administration and its Democratic critics continued to argue over the outcome of President Bush’s trip to Japan. Bush contends that the new import concessions made the trip a success; his critics say the agreements do not go far enough.

Miyazawa, in a taped interview aired on CNN’s “Evans and Novak,” acknowledged that Japan’s $41-billion trade surplus is a major source of friction with Washington. He said the latest agreements should answer “some of the criticism” voiced by U.S. executives, who attribute most of the imbalance to Japanese trade barriers.

Asked if Japan could do more to open its markets to American products, Miyazawa seemed to give a cautious, albeit indirect, negative response.

“The United States and Japan have been discussing this trade problem for over 10 years in the past and we have made great headway. So I really don’t think after this very lengthy, almost exhaustive, study there is much we can do or they want us to do,” Miyazawa said.

However, he also suggested that much of the trade surplus reflects a structural imbalance caused by U.S. dependence on Japanese products that America no longer produces itself.

The imbalance, Miyazawa added, results less from restrictions on foreign access to Japanese markets, which he said are “not as closed as most Americans like to think,” than from the export of Japanese “capital goods and materials that . . . the United States is not producing any more (and) that are indispensable in your economy.”

Attempting to defend the outcome of Bush’s visit against widespread criticism that it produced few economic gains, both the Japanese and American sides referred to a pledge by Japanese car makers to purchase an additional $10 billion in U.S.-made automobile parts over the next five years.

Administration officials assert that the agreement could lead to the creation of as many as 200,000 more jobs in the United States. But Chrysler Corp. Chairman Lee A. Iacocca and other auto industry executives who accompanied Bush to Tokyo have bitterly criticized the Japanese concessions as insufficient to reshape the trade imbalance or ease the recession.

In what appeared to be a gentle dig at Detroit, Miyazawa also said he wasn’t sure why Japanese consumers don’t like American cars but thought it might be because they are “all too large” or because they are always “in need of repair.”

U.S. auto company executives reject such criticism. They say that the major reason car sales account for the largest part of the U.S. trade deficit with Japan is protectionist restrictions designed to ensure that foreign-made cars cannot be sold for competitive prices in Japan.

“My Jeep Cherokee costs $12,000 more in Japan than it does here because . . . there’s a maze of red tape not designed to protect the Japanese consumer but to keep us out,” Iacocca said in a Detroit speech Friday after his return from Japan.

Hammering away at that theme Saturday, Michigan Democratic Sen. Donald W. Riegle Jr. accused Japan of “predatory trade targeting” that has “taken $460 billion worth of wealth” out of the United States over the last decade.

In a testy exchange with U.S. Trade Representative Carla Anderson Hills on CNN’s “Newsmaker Saturday,” Riegle said that the Japanese pledge to buy more U.S. auto parts is not a firm agreement and that “on the trade side and on the job side” Bush’s Asia trip was “really a flop.”

Hills countered that too much attention is being focused on the automotive side of the talks and not enough on the “measurable successes” that Bush achieved in negotiating smaller agreements.