Clinton, Japan Premier Meet to Build Rapport

With an eye on domestic politics here and in Japan, President Clinton and new Japanese Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto met Friday as tensions in the U.S.-Japan relationship still simmered. Their goal was an informal survey of the economic and security issues dividing their nations.

“An absolute ten-strike,” Clinton declared of the one-hour session in Santa Monica, having achieved a goal no grander than establishing a rapport between the two men who agreed to call each other “Ryo” (pronounced Roo by Clinton) and “Bill.”

Hashimoto, who developed a reputation as a no-holds-barred trade minister, was the great conciliator at his news conference after the meeting, stressing the amicable relationship that developed between the two men and the importance of maintaining a strong bilateral alliance.

Hashimoto is working to demonstrate to an audience back home that he can manage Japan’s all-important relations with the United States. To accomplish that, he became the ultimate jet-setter, leaving Tokyo on Friday morning to come to an hourlong conference with the president at the Sheraton Miramar Hotel before heading back across the Pacific this morning.

Clinton made wider use of his time here, beginning the day in Long Beach before cheering McDonnell Douglas workers who build the C-17 cargo jet for the Air Force, playing golf in the afternoon at the private Hillcrest Country Club and dining with a dozen major Democratic Party contributors at the Malibu home of music and movie impresario David Geffen after the Hashimoto meeting.

Speaking to a sun-drenched crowd in front of a massive new airplane painted in drab Air Force gray, Clinton, on his 22nd visit to California as president, announced that he is seeking congressional approval to extend production of the aircraft, which he calls “the world’s largest moving van” because of its role in sending supplies to Bosnia-Herzegovina.

He linked the workers’ jobs with efforts to break barriers to international trade--a focus of his economic policy, a central element in the U.S.-Japan talks and the topic of the moment in the U.S. presidential campaign.

One day after Republican presidential candidate Patrick J. Buchanan said he would “unilaterally” end Japan’s trade surplus if necessary--a surplus that fell dramatically last year--Clinton plunged into the swirling waters of the trade debate.

“If you want your country to lead for peace and freedom and prosperity, the answer is neither to be uncritically in favor of free trade, nor to be for pulling up the rug and closing our borders,” Clinton said. “The answer is to be for trade that is free and fair so everybody has a fair chance to grow in the global economy. That is what our country should stand for.”

It was the president’s most forceful response yet to the latest turn in the Republican campaign.

The support Buchanan has found for his attacks on Clinton’s efforts to lower trade barriers has forced other Republican candidates to step back from what has been their party’s policy in recent decades--that of favoring lower tariffs and quotas for U.S. products in foreign countries as well as for foreign-made goods in the United States.

To that end, Buchanan’s comments and his narrow victory in the New Hampshire primary election Tuesday have drawn anxious attention from Mexico, Japan and other major U.S. trading partners.

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Buchanan’s progress was not on the agenda for the Clinton-Hashimoto meeting, according to Anthony Lake, the president’s national security advisor.

But Walter F. Mondale, the U.S. ambassador to Japan who flew here for the meeting, said, “I think it’s fair to say they [the Japanese] wouldn’t like it.”

Hashimoto mugged for cameras at the start of the conference, raising his hands and stepping backward to feign fright when a reporter said Buchanan had said the Japanese prime minister would be more scared of a Buchanan presidency than of Clinton.

The meeting was arranged at Hashimoto’s request as an informal opportunity for he and the president to get to know each other before a more structured state visit to Tokyo that Clinton will make April 16-18.

It came at a time when some of the most intractable irritants in the relationship are no longer festering.

Most notably, an agreement that Hashimoto, as minister of international trade and industry, negotiated in June with U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor has removed from the table the angry debate over opening Japan’s auto market to U.S. cars, trucks and parts.

“I don’t say we’ve got the problem licked. But there’s been a very impressive . . . amount of progress,” Mondale said of the U.S.-Japanese trade partnership, offering a more optimistic assessment than some analysts outside of government.

Japanese government statistics, however, support the Mondale view: Japan’s trade surplus with the United States dropped 17% last year, the numbers say. It was the first such drop in five years, when measured in now-stronger U.S. dollars.

In addition, with U.S. exports to Japan increasing, Japan’s share of the U.S. trade deficit is shrinking.

“Other countries should do as well,” Clinton said.

But there are other issues: the movement in Japan to cut back the 47,000 U.S. troops there after the rape of a schoolgirl in Okinawa and the arrest of three U.S. servicemen for the crime, for example.

“Both sides agreed we would make strong efforts to make progress,” said Assistant Secretary of State Winston Lord, Clinton’s notetaker at the meeting. But on this and other contentious issues, he said, the leaders avoided specifics, devoting only a few minutes to each.

Hashimoto expressed optimism that the two sides will find a way to preserve the U.S.-Japan security alliance and also respond to the concerns of the Okinawan people, who have made clear their wishes for a reduction in the U.S. military presence on the island.

Hashimoto said Clinton expressed his regrets about the rape, and the prime minister said he is confident the U.S. government will come to the negotiating table in good faith.

Trade disputes beyond autos that have grabbed less attention but involve potentially billions of dollars worth of U.S. products were raised briefly by Clinton, who lumped them in the category of “unfinished business” for Hashimoto, Lord said. And they remained on the agenda of the next meeting.

Hashimoto confirmed that the two leaders did not directly address the toughest trade issues. “We should not emphasize these issues and undermine the U.S.-Japan relationship,” Hashimoto said.

Among the issues:

Hashimoto has been adamant in public about his goal of not renewing a 1986 agreement, which expires July 31, that led Japanese companies to purchase 20% of the semiconductors they use in computer products from foreign suppliers. But privately he is said to recognize that some sort of compromise might be acceptable in order to establish informal targets.

Mondale spoke optimistically about completing, in coming weeks, an agreement smoothing the way for a greater role by U.S. companies in the Japanese insurance market, which has been difficult to crack.

Hashimoto has been battered in his brief tenure by the aftermath of a Japanese banking scandal and by the economic turmoil that he inherited.

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It has been a tumultuous period in Japanese politics. Asked how many prime ministers Clinton has faced since taking office three years ago, Mondale said dryly: “There have been only five.”

Trying to end that turnover and heal some of the wounds he has incurred in the domestic political wars, Hashimoto is working on establishing his credentials as a statesman, taking a page from an American political adage: When in trouble, travel.

With personal relationships playing an important role in Japanese business and politics, Hashimoto sought the meeting to help establish the sort of acquaintance with Clinton that would allow him to “pick up the phone and contact the president directly if anything happens,” said a Japanese Foreign Ministry official who arrived here ahead of Hashimoto.

Hashimoto also made a point of reaching out to the local Japanese American community, meeting jointly with prominent residents and with executives from Japanese companies here. In the half-hour session in his suite at the Regent Beverly Wilshire, he urged the two groups to work together more closely to form a bridge between Japan and the United States.

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