REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK : Gun Issue Takes a Shot From Clinton

Eavesdropping on the President. . . .

When President Clinton phoned the parents of a Japanese exchange student shot to death by a gun-toting homeowner near Baton Rouge, La., to express his condolences earlier this week, the tone of some Japanese media reports suggested skepticism about his sincerity. They all but accused him of trying to curry favor with public opinion here.

But Friday, a CNN boom microphone inadvertently overheard Clinton chatting with Canadian Prime Minister Kim Campbell between sessions of the Group of Seven summit and picked up some evidence to silence the doubters.

“I was so upset by that . . . the young man who was killed--Yoshi Hattori, (who) was in Louisiana, which is just south of my home,” Clinton was heard telling Campbell.

Clinton also exclaimed in exasperated tones that “we had 24 people killed in Washington, D.C., the week before last. One week!”

The President told Campbell about his crime bill coming up for a vote in Congress and remarked that the National Rifle Assn., “once the most powerful lobby,” no longer has “the same kind of ultimate veto on public policy they once did.”

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Campbell caught her aides off guard when she met with Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin--and started speaking in Russian.

“It’s a bureaucratic nightmare to have your prime minister say something you can’t understand yourself,” an aide lamented to reporters.

The boss, whose field of graduate studies was Russian government, soon switched back to English.

“I think the anxious look on our faces may have had some effect,” the aide said.

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Speaking of anxiety. . . . Security agents cleared customers out of a restaurant in the Hotel Okura and searched it meticulously. Clinton and Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa were about to hold a previously unscheduled second meeting over dinner there Friday night.

But when the agents were done, they had no choice but to leave two long, very sharp knives behind the counter at which Clinton and Miyazawa were to sit. No knives, no dinner--for this was the hotel’s sushi restaurant.

A reporter asked the leaders whether they would hammer out a new framework for U.S.-Japan trade negotiations by dessert.

“No dessert with sushi,” Miyazawa replied.

“We’ll have an agreement on how good this sushi is,” Clinton added.

At the end of the dinner, there was no dessert. But ultimately, there was a “dessert”--it came after breakfast today when the two leaders announced a framework for negotiations.

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Outside the summit negotiating rooms, Hillary Rodham Clinton continued to be the showstopper. All week, camera crews have been close at her heels as she toured the city sights--from a high-tech garbage dump to the Tokyo museum to an Imperial Palace garden. On Friday, the First Lady joined some of the biggest stars of Japanese Kabuki theater for a curtain call after watching the final act of the love story “Toryu Oguri Hangan.” “When she came in, the applause was so loud we had to stop the play,” said actor Ennosuke Ichikawa, who is famous in Japan. “She really stole the show.”

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Protesters on Friday targeted an American who had considerable success breaking down Japan’s barriers to the outside world--140 years ago.

The latest of several attacks protesting the seven-nation summit was a suspected arson attack against a memorial to U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry, whose arrival in Tokyo Bay on July 8, 1853, with four warships eventually led to the end of 260 years of feudal seclusion for Japan.

Police said they smelled gasoline and found broken batteries, apparently used for a time-ignition device near a wall of the Perry memorial in the port of Yokosuka, about 28 miles south of Tokyo. Yokosuka, headquarters of U.S. Naval Forces Japan, has been the site of numerous demonstrations against the U.S. military presence.