Japan’s New Envoy to U.S. Sees ‘Crucial Period’ Ahead

Takakazu Kuriyama, 60, Japan’s ambassador-designate to Washington, predicted Monday that U.S.-Japanese relations are in for a “crucial period of mutual adjustment” and warned that “our whole relationship is going to be in serious trouble” if a “Buy American” campaign against Japanese products becomes widespread.

In an interview with selected correspondents here, Kuriyama also declared that “mutual criticism and recriminations” that have soured the two nations’ relations recently “are based on outdated and insufficient information about each other,” including “half-truths.”

The highly respected envoy, who last July completed a 37-year career at the pinnacle of Japanese professional diplomacy--in the post of vice minister of foreign affairs--said both government and public awareness of rapid change and growing interdependence in the United States and Japan must catch up with reality. “Otherwise, we are heading for more trouble,” he said.

Until the 1980s, he said, U.S.-Japanese ties represented a “one-sided relationship in which Tokyo was dependent upon the United States in all aspects--political, security, economic and others.”

But with Japan’s rapid economic rise and the emergence of a “multipolar world in which the United States could no longer play the kind of dominant role it used to play,” Japan and America now find themselves “in need of each other,” he said. “Both political leaders and the public in general in both countries have found it difficult to adjust themselves to the change that has taken place in the relationship itself. That is the main cause of frictions.”

Kuriyama, who advocates that Japan shed its “small-country mentality” to develop what he calls “an unassuming diplomacy of a superpower that doesn’t look like a superpower,” will leave in mid-March to assume his new post.

Building a true U.S.-Japanese “global partnership” joined by Europe is the “challenge of the 1990s,” he said.

Kuriyama said he does not view recent moves to promote a “Buy American” campaign in the United States as “representative of the sentiment of the American people.” But he added that, if the campaign spurs “widespread discriminatory practices” against Japanese goods, “it is obvious that our whole relationship is going to be in serious trouble.”

Like some of his countrymen, Kuriyama found fault with the way the U.S. economy operates. Americans over-consume, don’t save enough, are making insufficient investments in industry, must reduce their federal budget deficit and need to improve competitiveness in some industries, he said.

But unlike his compatriots--including Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa--who have denigrated such things as the American work ethic, Kuriyama complained that Japanese often concentrate on caricatures and fail to see the whole picture.

“It is a fact that American competitiveness in international markets has relatively declined. . . . It is one of many issues that Americans have to address. . . . But it’s a big mistake . . . to lose sight of the fact that there are many areas” in which Americans are “much more competitive than Japanese.”

America must solve its problems, he said, to soothe U.S.-Japanese frictions. For its part, Japan must build a society filled with “a more leisurely, richer life . . . quite different from the one in which we have lived so far,” he said. Japanese, he insisted, “are definitely moving in that direction.”

Both nations, he said, must work out “common rules for doing business with each other” and, in fact, are attempting to do so. But such rules must be different not only from “previous Japanese rules” but also from “previous American rules,” he said.