Japan Unhappy With Space Station Cutback : Diplomacy: Miyazawa may take up issue with Clinton. Budget decrease could spoil Tokyo’s planning.

Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa, who will face a host of trade complaints when he meets President Clinton on Friday, will also be bearing a grievance.

A recent American decision made “unilaterally and without consultation with Japan” to slash the U.S. budget for a space station project has displeased the Japanese, and Miyazawa may bring up the issue in Washington, Junji Yoshihara, director of the Japanese space agency’s office of space utilization, said Tuesday.

In addition to taking offense at the apparent violation of etiquette, Japan is worried that orders issued to NASA to come up with a new, cheaper design for the space station could play havoc with eight years of planning that Japan and 10 other nations have put into their portions of the international project.

“Japan will ask NASA not to make any change in the design that would force us to change our design of our experiment module” that will be attached to the space station, Yoshihara said.

Along with Canada and nine European nations, Japan joined the project at the United States’ request. About a third of this year’s budget for Japan’s National Aeronautics and Space Development Agency is devoted to it, Yoshihara said. Multi-year costs just for development will amount to 310 billion yen ($2.8 billion), he added.

Mamoru Nakajima, the agency’s director, told Parliament that Japan is “distressed by America’s change in the plan because of its own financial conditions.”

Yoshihara noted that in the 12-nation agreement governing the space station, a clause requires all participating governments to exert “supreme efforts” to budget the necessary funds.

The unilateral decision by the Clinton Administration also will deal a blow to possible Japanese cooperation with the United States in yet another “big science” project for which the George Bush Administration sought Japan’s cooperation, said both Yoshihara and Tadao Matsuzaki, planning officer at the Science and Technology Agency. That is the plan to construct an $8.25-billion superconducting super collider in Texas.

The super collider project is designed to probe the nature of matter by causing protons, guided by superconducting magnets, to collide at very high speeds in a massive underground tunnel.

Even before the space station snub, Japan reacted coolly when former Energy Secretary James D. Watkins made a special trip to Tokyo in December, 1991, to ask Japan to contribute $1.25 billion in equipment. Bush appealed to Miyazawa when he visited Japan in January, 1992.

“Opposition parties, as well as some (ruling party) Liberal Democrats, have been criticizing us for following in the footsteps of the United States in ‘big science’ projects,” Yoshihara said.

Matsuzaki described Japan’s present position on the super collider as “a blank sheet of paper” but noted that the project would have to compete with demands for upgrading university research facilities and other scientific projects.

“The ball is in America’s court right now,” he added.

Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary announced an Energy Department budget for fiscal 1994 in which funding for the super collider project was raised 24% to $640 million but the completion date was pushed back three years to 2002. But so far, the Clinton Administration has made no approach to Japan.

Yoshihara complained that the space station decision clearly lowers the priority that the United States places on international cooperation. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration was ordered to devise three alternative plans that would reduce the original $15-billion expenditure by between 40% and 67% over five years; but NASA’s overall budget in the same period would be cut by only 16%, he noted.

“Already, eight years have been spent in designing the space station. A detailed design has been produced and construction of a flight model has begun. It is extremely doubtful that the cost can be reduced by going back to the beginning at this time,” Yoshihara complained.