Japan’s L.A. Consul General Exudes Optimism : Commerce: Koichi Haraguchi says he’s not alarmed about relations with the United States,despite recent friction.
Koichi Haraguchi, Japan’s new consul general in Los Angeles, came to town at a time that most diplomats might consider inauspicious.
One of his predecessor’s last duties was to huddle with former Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu at the New Otani Hotel as rioting spread through the city on April 29.
With Korean-American merchants targeted for looting and arson, Little Tokyo was gripped by fears that wanton violence against those of Asian origin might follow. Suddenly it seemed that the coveted L.A. post, which Haraguchi had lobbied hard for, was in the middle of a war zone.
But when he arrived a month later and drove from the airport to his new residence in Hancock Park, his eyes fixed on a symbol of hope amid the shocking ruins of burned-out buildings.
“I spotted the brilliance of what seemed to be thousands of blue morning glories beside one of the sites of destruction,” Haraguchi wrote in a recent consulate newsletter. “The contrast was so vivid and somehow soul-soothing!”
To express the emotion of the moment, he borrowed a haiku from the poet Basho, substituting the foreign flower for cherry blossoms:
How many, many a-thing
They call to mind,
These morning glories!
Haraguchi, 51, comes to Los Angeles at a time when the city’s confidence is shaken by civil unrest. He also arrives as Japan-U.S. economic relations, by some accounts, are deteriorating. The atmosphere is strained by Japan’s rebounding trade surplus and by irritants such as dumping allegations and “buy American” campaigns.
Yet Tokyo’s envoy is an unapologetic optimist.
“It’s wrong to get alarmed when looking at our relations,” he said in an interview. “If you look closely, you’ll see the mutual benefits. An economic relationship can only exist when both parties benefit. It is not a zero-sum game.”
About 700 major Japanese firms and perhaps as many as 2,000 smaller companies have invested and set up operations in Southern California, providing jobs for Americans--and making efforts to be good corporate citizens, Haraguchi noted.
The popular notion that an economic threat from Japan is replacing the Soviet military menace as America’s major security concern, documented in opinion polls the last several years, is an expression of faltering confidence on the U.S. side, he said.
“Maybe you have become too much accustomed to being No. 1 in everything,” Haraguchi said. “Whenever you have to adjust yourself to difficulties, that causes you a lot of psychological pain.”
Haraguchi is fond of telling the story of his uncle, who immigrated to the United States against the wishes of his parents around the turn of the century. The family didn’t hear from the uncle until shortly after World War II, when Tokyo was in ashes and people were starving. Suddenly, care packages from New York started arriving, filled with candy, canned food and used clothing.
“From those packages, America, I thought, must truly be a land of plenty,” Haraguchi told the Japan America Society last month.
Later, after he had graduated from elite Tokyo University and entered the diplomatic service, the Foreign Ministry sent him to study at Williams College in Massachusetts. Haraguchi ventured down to New York, where he was surprised to see that his rich American uncle wasn’t prosperous at all, but actually living alone under rather modest circumstances.
The diplomatic career that followed took Haraguchi from a post in Jakarta in the mid-1960s, when Indonesian society was going through profound convulsions, to Seoul in the early 1980s, when South Korea was experiencing explosive economic growth.
His link with America was re-established when he spent a year as a fellow at Harvard University’s Center for International Affairs, and subsequently became press attache at the Japanese Embassy in Washington.
There, Haraguchi said he faced one of his major challenges as a diplomat. Then-Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone made some disparaging remarks in Japan about the intelligence of America’s black and Latino minorities, igniting a storm of protest.
Attempts at damage control soon gave way to a humbling learning experience, as Haraguchi met with minority leaders such as the Rev. Jesse Jackson.
“It was a very important lesson for me, coming from a homogenous society,” he recalled. “We knew so little about the complexity of the problems of ethnic groups in the United States. I found many Americans with a strong conviction that ethnic diversity is a source of American strength.”
Haraguchi was based in Tokyo for the last four years, serving as the Foreign Ministry’s deputy director-general for public affairs and deputy director-general of the economic affairs bureau. He is joined in Los Angeles by his wife, Katsuko, and two of their three teen-age sons, Udai and Yui. Their oldest son, Yuto, stayed in Tokyo to study for college entrance exams.
