Tokyo Crisis May Affect Aid, Trade Ties : Diplomacy: But U.S. experts say that if corruption in Japanese system is curbed, that would serve American interests.

The political crisis in Japan sent ripples through Washington on Friday as officials expressed concern about its impact on U.S. efforts to increase Tokyo’s assistance to Russia and on the intensified process of improving stormy U.S.-Japan trade relations.

In the long run, any development that leads to less corruption within the Japanese system will serve U.S. interests, experts in and out of government said, because it will break the lock on government policy exercised by industry that often blocks U.S. access to lucrative Japanese markets.

“It is not necessarily all bad,” said Doug Paal, a senior National Security Council expert on Asia in the George Bush Administration. “The Japanese had to break the corruption in politics. But the timing is awful.”

“I hope this does not have an adverse effect,” said Mickey Kantor, the U.S. trade representative who is about to visit Japan to take part in trade policy talks. But, he added: “It raises the anxiety level.”

The upheaval is occurring less than three weeks before Japan is scheduled to host the annual conference of the seven leading industrial democracies. In addition, the United States is pressing Japan to agree before that meeting to a new economic framework that would help to open up Japan’s tightly controlled markets.

Experts on Japanese affairs expressed concern that uncertainty about the Japanese government could bring uncertainty to the government’s economic policies, thus blocking stimulus packages beyond a $115-billion program that Japan announced last April. Such a delay could further impede global growth and eventually have an impact on the U.S. economy, they said.

In another area, Japan has been counted on to help boost the major nations’ contributions to Russia and to speed up international negotiations on reducing tariffs and other barriers to international trade. Officials had talked optimistically about completing the seven-year negotiations in December.

The summit meeting--at which Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa will be joined by President Clinton and the leaders of Britain, Canada, France, Germany and Italy--is seen primarily as an occasion for taking stock of world developments, said a senior Clinton Administration official, rather than one that would set a new course.

Still, he said, “It will make it more difficult to secure new initiatives at the summit.”

Until the crisis struck in Tokyo, U.S. and Japanese officials had expressed considerable optimism that by the time Clinton arrived in Japan for the summit, U.S. and Japanese aides would be able to produce a new approach to U.S.-Japanese trade that would bring about greater access for U.S. manufacturers, builders and providers of financial services.

“Clearly, it makes things a little more complicated,” a senior Administration official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “The domestic and international vice ministers have enough stand-alone authority to do things on their own, if they are so inclined. But they now have built-in cover (to avoid action) if they are not so inclined.”

Julius Katz, who served as deputy U.S. trade representative during the Bush Administration and who played a major role in the multinational talks on world trade under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, said that “the conventional wisdom about Japan is that the bureaucracy will carry forward on these international activities, notwithstanding the political turmoil that swirls about them.”

“Personally, I think that is the right answer. But I can’t be sure because I don’t recall a Japanese government previously falling in this way against a background of serious concern about reform,” he said.

Times staff writers Jim Mann and Doyle McManus contributed to this article.