NEWS ANALYSIS : Clinton Shifts Japan Focus From Security to Economy : Relations: In a break with past, the President refuses to retreat from his blunt insistence on change in Tokyo.

Amid the snow and ice of a bad Washington winter, Japan and the United States served notice Friday that the Cold War alliance between them really has come to an end.

For the first time, the United States is concentrating more on the economic disagreements than on the security ties between Washington and Tokyo.

Since the 1950s, the United States has repeatedly given security ties greater weight than economics in its relationship with Japan. Although President Clinton took office pledging to reorder these priorities, Japanese officials had hoped he would end up behaving like his predecessors in the White House.

“Whenever there is a new Administration (in Washington), they always blow a lot of hot air, but after several months it quiets down,” former Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa quipped last year.

For a time, it seemed Japan’s hopes might be realized. Clinton avoided confrontation with Japan both at July’s economic summit in Tokyo and during Japan’s first six months under the leadership of new Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa.

But the President made it plain Friday that even in the midst of security crises like North Korea’s nuclear program, he does not intend to retreat from his blunt insistence on fundamental economic change in Japan.

“You have to develop a more open economy and society,” he admonished one Japanese reporter at Friday’s press conference as a solemn-faced delegation of Japanese officials looked on behind Hosokawa.

Clinton’s own top advisers--far more unified in their approach to Japan than past Administrations--are, if anything, even tougher than the President in insisting that the relationship between the two countries undergo a dramatic change.

“For 45 or 50 years, the main item in U.S.-Japanese relations was security. Japan was the bulwark against Soviet expansion eastward,” Deputy Treasury Secretary Roger Altman said this week. “Well, the Cold War is over and the President of the United States is a person centered around economics. . . .

“ ‘It’s the economy, stupid,’ ” Altman declared, echoing a now-famous Clinton campaign slogan. “The traditional American approach of subordinating economic interests to security is over. This economic relationship (with Japan) has been unbalanced for some time. It’s time to bring Japan into step. . . . The world has changed.”

One leading U.S. critic of Japan’s economic policies, UC San Diego Prof. Chalmers Johnson, praised the Administration for its stand.

“I was really scared to death we were going to have some sort of Gergenism, claiming there was a breakthrough,” Johnson told The Times on Friday.

(He was referring to senior White House adviser David Gergen, who in July extravagantly hailed Clinton’s first effort at a trade accord in Tokyo.)

“Japan will change only when the circumstances are forced upon it. It profits from free-market economics without opening up to a free market.”

Johnson said, however, that he believes it has taken Clinton and his aides too long to try to reduce the U.S. trade deficit with Japan, which was close to $60 billion last year. “The sole result of this on-the-job education by the Clinton Administration is that we are now $60 billion poorer,” he said. “That (sum of money) is what Mrs. Clinton needs to make health care work.”

By contrast, Douglas Paal, a former George Bush Administration specialist on Asia, accused Clinton and his aides of “pushing too fast, too soon for change with Hosokawa, when he clearly has limits on his ability to act.”

What was striking after Friday’s Clinton-Hosokawa summit was the extent to which senior U.S. officials were willing, indeed eager, to talk about starting entirely fresh in the American relationship with Japan. One top U.S. official said the meeting and its aftermath mark “a clear break with the past.”

Will intense economic frictions erode the close security ties between the United States and Japan? Both governments took pains Friday to insist that nothing has changed in that area.

“The rest of our relationship is in good shape,” Clinton said at the news conference.

Hosokawa, too, sought to cordon off and minimize the economic differences. He described the ties between the United States and Japan as “the relationship between grown-ups.” The use of that metaphor, however, seemed to suggest a degree of acrimony and to raise questions about whether the United States had until now been treating Japan like a child--or whether both countries had lost the happiness of childhood.

Until negotiations finally broke down in the early hours Friday morning, it appeared that the Japanese officials were still unsure of the strength of the Clinton Administration’s commitment to its economic objectives with Japan.

They had some reason for uncertainty. The President had sent some conflicting signals last year.

As soon as Clinton was inaugurated, then-Prime Minister Miyazawa sought to visit him in Washington. The new Administration put him off, with senior U.S. officials saying that there was no point in an early meeting between the two leaders because Japan needed to take steps to ease the trade imbalance between the two countries.

When Miyazawa finally came to the White House last April, he had an icy and confrontational session with Clinton, who insisted that his Administration would focus less on initiatives than on results.

“Let’s not paper this over,” he told the Japanese leader at one point, setting a theme that he echoed several times Friday.

But these early tough signals could be dismissed as mere rhetoric. And in fact, the Administration’s policies toward Japan were moderated in late June and early summer.

At the time, Clinton was much lower in the polls than he is now. And U.S. officials now acknowledge that they decided on a policy of restraint last summer after they saw that Miyazawa’s Liberal Democratic Party, which had ruled Japan for nearly four decades, was about to fall. They maintained this low-key approach for several months after Hosokawa’s coalition government took office.

At the economic summit in Tokyo last July, when Miyazawa stood up at a news conference and rehashed Japan’s opposition to numerical targets for reducing Japan’s trade surplus, Clinton replied: “We have a slight difference of view on that. But . . . there’s no point in bringing (it) up again.”

The Administration’s patience began to run out by late fall, when it saw that the U.S. trade deficit with Japan was continuing to mount and that efforts at negotiations between the two countries were going nowhere. Some Administration officials privately urged Clinton to come down hard on Hosokawa last November when the two men met with other Asian leaders in Seattle. But Clinton held off once again.

On Friday, there was no holding back.

“Of course, if Japan has further proposals, our door remains open,” the President said. “But ultimately, Japan’s market must be open.”