Failed Japan Trade Talks

* While I applaud President Clinton’s attempt to force Japan to stop its restrictive trade policies (Feb. 12), NAFTA will let Japan get in through the back door by allowing Japan to produce cars in Mexico and ship them into the U.S. duty-free. Do you suppose the fact that Japanese Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa is aware of this has strengthened his stand against dropping Japan’s trade barriers? Why should he fear American retaliation when he knows that NAFTA gives Japan an even better deal?

EDWIN C. BAUR

Rancho Palos Verdes

* There is much I agree with in the commentary by Alan Stoga (Feb. 8) regarding trade friction between Japan and the United States.

Of the several statements I disagree with, the most glaring is as follows: “But the core U.S. demand, in effect, that Japan should guarantee specific shares of its market for American-made imports. . . .” Stoga is wrong in his interpretation of the American position. This is the “spin” Japan gives the trade talks.

I have not heard Clinton, Lloyd Bentsen, Ron Brown or Mickey Kantor make statements as described by Stoga. What they have said repeatedly is that some system must be devised to measure progress to which both countries can concur. Japan and the United States both agree that the trade deficit with the U.S. must be reduced.

This Administration’s position is a far cry from managed trade, such as was instituted by the Bush Administration regarding the semiconductor industry.

BALDWIN T. ECKEL

Upland

* Hosokawa’s obdurate stance against easing the inequitable trade balance between his country and the U.S. is a cynical insult, and should not be tolerated. Enough of pacifying and turning of cheek in the face of such monumental conceit.

President Clinton should lose no time to implement the high-priority, high-profile trade actions against Japan that are at his disposal. It is high time we utilize some of the tactics, admittedly onerous, but favored for so long by Japan, like “harassment tools” on automobiles, limiting Japanese cellular telephone sales in the U.S., scaling back tax benefits given to Japanese auto makers in the U.S., and enforcing laws against the practice of “dumping.”

Appeasement has been exposed as a horrendous military failure. It is no less a losing proposition in commerce, where one “trading” party has been consistently hostile and uncooperative for more than four decades.

Not incidentally, those of us who continue to opt for Japanese cars and trucks, despite their much greater cost and the proven equality of American-made models, give comfort and support to our economic enemy.

LOUIS CONCILIO

Garden Grove

* Regarding your article on Motorola’s difficulties in doing business with Japan because of its alleged untruths, legal costs, etc. (Feb. 21):

The U.S. can build scientific products and equipment that can go to the moon, yet somehow the Japanese allege that the quality of our manufactured products does not meet the standards for their ordinary little automobiles. Let’s respond that the quality of the Japanese “business ethic” does not meet our standards, and refuse their business as they refuse our products. Let us proceed from there.

KENNETH M. HAMILTON

La Jolla

* In response to “In Japan, Fair Trade Is Matter of Perception,” news analysis, Feb. 17: Contained in that otherwise useful article is a phrase that also perpetuates a perception, one that reinforces the value of confrontation over debate, that Japan prohibited trade with foreigners until “ . . . the cannons of Commodore Matthew Perry’s Black Ships abruptly ended the empire’s isolation.”

Samuel Eliot Morison’s biography, “Old Bruin Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry” (1967), clearly reports Perry’s (not so abrupt--over a period of five years) negotiation with Japan as unique in an era of gunboat diplomacy. Perry was praised as having brought: “This secluded empire into the intercourse of nations as one of the great events of the age . . . the more so as it has been accomplished, not by bloodshed and the devastation of war, but by means of a frank, energetic and determined course of negotiation.”

We need less loose cannons and more diplomacy. And more knowledge of the difference between special interests and public benefit on both sides of the Pacific. Even today Japanese use the phrase “black ships” to characterize unwanted foreign pressure, but the political dynamic in Japan in the 1850s was a domestic desire to end isolation and feudal oppression.

ROBERT L. SHARP

South Pasadena