PERSPECTIVE ON JAPAN : Fixated on Those Lonely Rocks : Tokyo has not grasped that the Cold War is over. A coalition needs to come to power, breaking one-party rule.

Twice in less than a year, leaders of major nations with important business in Japan have canceled official trips to Tokyo--and for the same reason. The Japanese are so preoccupied with themselves and their own economic and political advantages that they cannot be bothered to respond to issues of global significance. First was President Bush, who last November asked for a rain check on his visit to Tokyo where he was supposed to talk about the hollowing out of the American economy. Now it is Russian President Boris Yeltsin, who canceled a trip to Japan that was to have begun today.

Bush eventually went and took with him 21 CEOs of American corporations. But he still could not get across to the Japanese that commercial activities among allies are supposed to be mutually beneficial, not a form of a war by other means. Yeltsin faces a similar if ultimately much more serious problem.

Almost three years after the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, Japan still has not grasped that the Cold War is over. In its wake, and particularly after the failed Russian coup of 1991 and the subsequent implosion of the Soviet Union, major new problems confront the world. None is more serious than the attempt to stabilize Russia and to protect the newborn democracy that Yeltsin’s government represents. The Russian people are paying heavily for the sins of communism, but it is essential that Russia’s calamity not fester so long that it leads to an even greater calamity. Russia has not disappeared; like France after Napoleon, it will be back. Will it then be thankful for the help it received in its hour of greatest need, or will it only remember that some members of the free world tried to rip it off when it was down? Something like that happened to Germany after World War I.

Japan has good reason to think about Russia and its future. Enmity between the two goes back to the turn of the century, when they each tried to beat out the other colonizing the peoples of Korea and Manchuria. That struggle led to war in 1904-05, a war that Japan won and that started the movement toward revolution in Russia. Japan has more reason than almost any other nation to want to see a friendly, prosperous, democratic Russia emerge from the rubble of the Soviet Union.

Even though the Germans have extended major aid to Yeltsin while also rebuilding East Germany, and President Bush made a me-too effort after former President Nixon told him what to do, the Japanese have done nothing except make promises. What they demand first is the return of some virtually uninhabited islands off Hokkaido in the northern Pacific, even if that would bring down Yeltsin and lead to a rightist coup in Moscow.

During World War II, Japan and the Soviet Union maintained neutrality toward each other until six days before Japan surrendered. On Aug. 9, 1945, having been promised the return of South Sakhalin (lost in 1905) and the Southern Kuril Islands by Roosevelt and Churchill at Yalta, Stalin entered the war against Japan. For about a decade after the war, Japan accepted this loss of territory as a cost of having attacked the United States and Britain in the first place. But with the development of the Cold War and the United States’ proffered alliance with Japan as part of its strategy against the Soviet Union, Japan began to claim that Stalin had stolen the islands. The Americans went along.

Over time, the “return of the Northern Territories,” as the Japanese call the islands, became an idee fixe that the end of the Cold War seemed to harden further. Like Hiroshima, the Northern Territories bolstered Japan’s self-identity as a victim of World War II rather than an aggressor. The problem is that Yeltsin cannot give the islands back right now and survive right-wing charges of selling out to Japan, and he wants to talk with Japanese leaders about a lot of things more important to him than these disputed rocks. But none of that penetrated the drumbeat in Tokyo against Yeltsin for not handing them over.

Although Japan is the world’s richest nation in terms of per-capita income, saving rates, investment rates, trade surpluses, life expectancy and many other measures, it still refuses to assume any responsibility for building and maintaining a new world order. Japan demands to be made a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council but is unwilling to implement Security Council resolutions calling for military actions to keep the peace. It plans to send its emperor to China but forbids him to apologize for atrocities committed there during World War II in his father’s name. It will not make any effort to save the Uruguay Round of GATT negotiations by opening up its closed rice market, while it rails against “protectionism” in the United States. And now it turns its back on the already very fragile efforts of Boris Yeltsin to lead Russia toward democracy.

In a paper timed for Yeltsin’s arrival, the Japanese Socialist Party criticized the ruling Liberal Democratic Party for “clinging solely to the territorial issue,” causing the Russians to harden their position and “narrowing the possibilities for a solution.” The Socialists called on the government to quit “linking politics with economics, extend large-scale financial assistance and adopt a policy of realizing the return of the Northern Territories through stabilization of Russia.” This is such excellent advice that with the end of the Cold War, our policy should be to try to bring a coalition of parties to power in Japan. The world needs a two-party system in Japan, after 44 years of conservative rule.