Harsh Views on Japan May Help Fuel Perot Campaign : Politics: His remarks on U.S. allies suggest he’d take a tougher stance on trade talks. He also calls for government to assist domestic companies.

In one interview, presidential aspirant Ross Perot contends that America’s foreign competitors, such as the Japanese, have “picked our pockets.”

In another, he says that one of the first things he would do in the White House would be to present Japan and Germany with bills for $50 billion apiece to offset U.S. defense costs for maintaining world stability. In a third, he calls President Bush’s visit to Japan early this year “a joke.” And in yet another, Perot says he would require the Japanese to “take the same deal on cars we’ve given” them--in effect, drastically reducing imports.

Whatever his ambiguity on other issues, Perot has already staked out a position as a staunch critic of the Bush Administration’s policy toward Japan--and of Bush’s reluctance to provide government help for American companies in meeting the challenge of foreign competition.

It now appears that these themes may figure prominently in Perot’s presidential campaign this fall. They are themes that Perot may well use in coming months to differentiate himself from Bush and Democratic candidate Bill Clinton, the governor of Arkansas. During the primaries, Clinton described himself as a believer in free trade and generally refrained from attacking Administration policy toward Japan.

These Japan-related themes also suggest some of the most important changes Perot would be likely to make if elected to the White House. His remarks indicate that he would take a tougher stance in international trade talks and would try to make allies like Japan and Germany do more, or at least pay more, for their own defense and security.

Perot’s views appear to arise from his experience as a private businessman irked by the erosion of America’s economic strength. “We’ve got to beat Japan. We’ve got to beat Germany,” Perot said at a public rally in Texas five years ago, long before he began flirting with a run for the White House.

“I think he (Perot) has an attitude shared by a lot of high-technology entrepreneurs,” says Clyde Prestowitz, who once served as President Ronald Reagan’s senior trade negotiator with Japan and now advocates a more aggressive trade policy and a national industrial strategy. “Based on conversations with him going back three or four years, I think he believes U.S. policy toward many of its trading partners is naive and unrealistic.”

Perot’s opinions also underscore his evident distaste for some of the recent changes in American society. At one point five years ago, he told an audience in Cambridge, Mass., that much of the credit for Japan’s industrial success is attributable to mothers who stay home with their children.

Perot’s published comments about Japan already seem to be giving Tokyo a bad case of the jitters.

Last month, at a press conference in Washington, the Japanese ambassador to the United States denounced Perot’s idea--suggested in an interview with David Frost--that the United States should present Japan with a $50-billion bill to offset American defense costs.

“I would like to tell Mr. Perot that we are already paying a fair amount of the bill regarding the U.S. costs in Japan,” Takakazu Kuriyama said.

“In fact, we are already spending something like $70,000 per capita per annum for U.S. soldiers stationed in Japan, and the figure is going to increase probably up to the level of somewhere around $100,000 per U.S. soldier in a couple of years’ time. And this amounts to close to two-thirds of the American military expenditures in the Western Pacific.”

While Japan frets about Perot, some Americans who have called for a tougher stance toward Japan are gravitating to the Perot campaign.

Pat Choate, author of “Agents of Influence,” a book describing how Japan uses its financial clout to retain prominent Americans as its lobbyists, recently spoke at a rally for Perot in New York. He praised Perot’s desire to stop the “revolving door” phenomenon of officials moving between U.S. government jobs and the private sector.

“Perot says over and over again that he’s going to close down the revolving door in Washington, which has been the pillar of Japan’s political strength,” Choate says. “If Perot is elected, it will cause cardiac arrest inside this town. It will throw lots of people out of the trough.”

Some Washington lawyers and former Administration officials maintain that the influence of Washington’s “revolving door” or of Japan’s lobbying is exaggerated.

“He (Perot) is running a populist campaign, and this fits in with the populist image,” says Stuart E. Eisenstadt, formerly President Jimmy Carter’s domestic policy adviser. “In terms of a real problem, for its impact on our trade deficit or competitiveness, it’s a pimple on an elephant.” Eisenstadt now represents the giant Japanese firm Hitachi, although he says he does no lobbying for the company.

Perot’s record in the private sector and his statements in the early stage of his likely presidential campaign show that three interrelated themes arise again and again:

* Competition with Japan: A central Perot theme is that Japan is a formidable economic competitor and that the Reagan and Bush administrations have allowed themselves to be out-negotiated and out-hustled by Japan and other allies in international trade negotiations.

“In 1945, if I had told you that nine of the 10 biggest banks would be Japanese, you’d have dismissed me as a lunatic,” he told a seminar of high-tech professionals at the Harvard Business School four years ago, according to an account of his speech in the Boston Globe.

The failure of American industry to stay ahead “comes from being on top too long,” Perot said. He claimed the turning point was World War II: “We would be like the Japanese if we had lost the war.”

* Government support of industry: A second Perot theme is that the U.S. government should target certain American industries for special government help, as Japan has done.

“In Japan, they have an intelligent, supportive relationship between government and industry. . . . We have an adversarial relationship,” he told Business Week in April. “. . . (U.S.) government seems to be preoccupied with trying to break industry’s legs.”

Bush has repeatedly said he is opposed to an “industrial policy,” contending it is not the federal government’s job to pick winners and losers among private companies.

Perot insists that he is not calling for an industrial policy, but he regularly praises Japan for its own version of the same thing.

“Now, please, don’t say I’m proposing industrial policy. I’m not,” he told the American Society of Newspaper Editors in April. “But if you study MITI (the Ministry of International Trade and Industry) in Japan, it works. They target industries of the future, and 10 years later, 19 out of 20 integrated circuits that we use in this country are made in Japan.”

* Washington’s revolving door: Perot’s third theme is that decisions in Washington--particularly those involving foreign trade disputes--are being improperly influenced by lobbyists who used to work for the U.S. government but now are paid by foreign interests.

“The first thing you’ll hear back from the (U.S.) car companies . . . is we have made the strangest trade agreements in the world with our international competitors. They have picked our pockets,” Perot said in the Business Week interview.

“Why? They knew how to negotiate. The people we sent over didn’t. And the people we sent over to negotiate know that, if they keep their noses clean, that in a short period of time they can be hired for $30,000 a month as a Japanese lobbyist.”

If he were elected President, Perot said, “I would ask for a law immediately from Congress that anybody that participates in this (trade talks) can’t go over to the other side later. They can’t cash in on having been around it.”

Oddly enough, given his outspokenness on these issues, the record is mixed on whether Perot would favor import quotas, restrictions or other forms of protectionist trade measures.

In a speech five years ago, he said the United States should move “very, very carefully” in applying trade sanctions against Japan. If sanctions were to remain in place for too long, he said, the Japanese could simply evade them by building more factories in the United States.

But last week, in an interview with The Times, Perot said: “Agreements we’ve cut with countries around the world are not balanced at all.” A fairer deal on autos with Japan would mean “you could never unload the ships to this country.”

Perot also has voiced strong reservations about the Bush Administration’s proposal for a free trade agreement with Mexico. “Just to suddenly throw the doors open will really, really, really wipe out the jobs of millions of people in this country,” he told one group of investment officials in Texas last month.

In The Times interview, he said labor in Mexico is “a 25-year-old with little or no health-care expense working for a dollar an hour. You cannot compete with that in the U.S.A., period.”

Although he avoided saying he was absolutely opposed to a free-trade pact with Mexico, Perot said in the Business Week interview that “the guys that put this agreement together must know something I don’t know.”