ROUND THE WORLD FOR $39 MILLION

Murray Sayle on the tree frogs in space,

their Japanese sponsor, and what this all means for international economic rivalry

Tokyo WAS IT a bird? Was it a plane? No, it was Supersell, the first unashamed commercial advertising in outer space, launched last week from, of all places, Baikonur, the cosmodrome in Soviet Central Asia from which heroic astrobitch Laika took off 33 years ago to kick off our wondrous age of space travel. In those far-off days of cosmic innocence, space was the province of pure knowledge and that faithful hound is still out there somewhere, a martyr to science, the crude radios beeping her vital signs long since fallen silent.

These days, as readers may have noticed, we are all rather more mercenary. Last week's merchandising break- through passed another milestone, the first fare- paying passenger to leave the earth's atmos- phere. For eight days in space, 128 orbits of the planet and a safe return the Soviets charged $39 million, payable in hard currency. Not many travellers have that kind of cash to spare and the intrepid voyager was Toyohiro Akiyama, 48, a news reader employed by the Tokyo Broadcasting System, Japan's biggest private television network. TBS is no more of a philanthropic organisation than the Soviet Space Admin- istration. The network has managed to recoup $30 million of its investment in Akiyama's epoch-making trip by selling advertising space on the sides of Soyuz TM-11 space capsule and around the launch site. The advertisers, all Japanese, included makers of deodorants, disposable nappies (different shapes for boy and girl infants, another marketing first) and sanit- ary towels. The intention was not, of course, to push these useful products to fastidious androids, or even to telescope- wielding humanity down below, but to viewers back in Japan, where TBS is locked in a savage ratings battle with five other commercial networks.

Akiyama's television and radio broad- casts during his flight included no direct sales pitches from space (although he did make clear that he was photographing his home planet with a video camera made by Sony, one of his sponsors) and the pharm- aceutical advertisers were encouraged by the network to avoid the vulgar hard sell and restrict themselves to dignified display

of their company trademarks and slogans. Nevertheless the Asahi newspaper (which owns a competing television network) has described its rival's enterprise as a 'sales blitz' and cattily suggested that the experi- ments Akiyama was performing on camera had no scientific value and were mere 'children's games'.

One of them was indeed a cup-and-ball game played by Japanese children which the network described as 'an experiment to test hand-eye co-ordination in a state of weightlessness' (Akiyama never did man- age to get the ball into the cup). Another involved the release of six Japanese tree frogs which Akiyama had brought up from earth with him. The problem, which according to the network has baffled the finest minds of Oriental science, was whether the amphibians finding themselves weightless would assume they were on land and jump, or in water and swim. (In the event they seemed, as far as television viewers could tell, to be simply confused by the whole treeless ambience.) This experi- ment was in fact suggested by an eight- year-old primary schoolgirl, and may show that science has discovered the true target market for future travelling space sales- men.

As he circled Earth the personable Akiyama at least managed to mock some of the stiff- upper-lip posturing that has turned more profes- sional space travellers into rather dull dogs. 'I even have to strain to take a leak up here,' he told a ground-bound woman interviewer in Akiyama sensibly spent a lot of time looking out the window and did offer some interesting observations on the way the world was going. The Brazilian rainforest which Japanese timber firms are accused of chopping down was indeed, he said, look- ing a little thin on top. Eastern Europe lay under a pall of smoke and politics. The non-industrial Caribbean, he noticed, was a sparkling blue, whereas the Sea of Japan and the nearby Pacific were grubby grey- brown. Altogether, Japanese viewers look- ing down through the TBS Sony from their rented spacecraft could pardonably have concluded that their small country has indeed made its mark on the world, a mark that will take some energetic scrubbing off.

This impression was reinforced by the news released while Akiyama was still aloft that the giant Japanese electronics firm Matsushita has bought Music Corporation of America for $6.1 billion, the biggest purchase ever made in the entertainment business. The deal gives Matsushita own- ership of Universal Studios of Hollywood, and with them dominion over ET — The Extra-terrestrial, Jaws, Back to the Future and a whole library of similar fantasies, all quintessentially American. Can Mickey be his own mouse much longer? With Col- umbia Pictures, for which Matsushita's deadly rival Sony paid $5 billion last year, the Japanese now direct a quarter of American film production. Counting in Italian, crypto-Australian and other inter- lopers, half of Hollywood is now in foreign hands.

Concern was expressed in the United States when the news broke that what Americans see on their screens, big and small, is henceforth to be decided by a committee of electrical appliance manufac- turers in Osaka. But 'the industry', as it is called out on the Coast, has survived some very odd fish cruising the Hollywood alli- gator tank, as Scott Fitzgerald noticed at a studio executive lunch in The Last Tycoon back in 1940:

They were the money men, they were the rules. Eight out of the ten were Jews — five of the ten were foreign-born, including a Greek and an Englishman, and they had all known each other for a long time. There was a rating in the group, from old Marcus down to old Leanbaum who had bought the most fortunate block of stock but was never allowed to spend over a million a year producing.

Half a century on, nothing much has changed. Money still makes the important decisions, although you can't produce much for a million these days and writers are more cautious about sounding anti- Semitic (Fitzgerald's hero, Monroe Stahr, was Jewish, as was his idolised real-life model, Irving Thalberg). Even if the Osa- ka moneybags should now order Holly- wood to turn out classical No dramas with the cast wearing masks., the plots could scarcely be more predictable or the acting more wooden than those of Rocky V or Deadly Force XII. The chairman of MCA, Lew Wasserman, a former agent and used- car dealer, closed last week's deal with a personal haul of $327 million of Matsushita loot in salary, dividends, sweeteners and stock options. Some key Hollywood fi- gures, it seems, are broadminded enough to work for the highest bidder.

Just the same, we may be tempted to wonder, what on — or over — earth is going on? Soviet rockets, which were once programmed to take Cuban, East German and Ghanaian spacemen aloft to advertise the triumphs of communism, are now reduced to being sandwich-boards for Japanese chemists' shops. Domestic ap- pliance makers from the same country squabble over the carcasses of Hollywood's destitute idols. The Americans' own space programme seems to be going no better, with the shuttle Columbia, engaged in a rival set of scientific broadcasts to schools, threatened with failure this week because of a blocked lavatory. Europeans on both sides who once swore by the green of the spring that they'd never forget are now competing for the favours of Germany, Japan's one-time Axis partner and the world's only other solvent economy with major money to spare. It may be a funny old world, as the lady said, but all this gratuitous role-reversal is getting ridicu- lous.

A first glance suggests a simple, perhaps too simple explanation. The United States and the Soviet Union, one theory holds, have exhausted each other fighting the cold war. In the Soviet Union free enterprise in the shape of the black market has got out of control, while the US government has mortaged its future up to the hilt pumping up the synthetic boom of the 1980s, which finally persuaded its ideological rival that their system could never compete. Rich Germans and Japanese are thus able to stroll through the superpowers' cold-war- ravaged economies snapping up bargains, just as the victorious allies did to Germany and Japan 80 years ago, when Laika was still a wag in her father's tail. Certainly the warm-up of relations be- tween the Soviet Union and the United States is proceeding at an astonishing pace, considering that all this human, canine and amphibian space travel grew out of weapons development originally intended to blow the other side to ashes. The old rivals these days seem to be giving each other the unquestioning support of people in the same leaky boat, just as they did long ago when the Axis was still in busi- ness. What boat, we may wonder, could that be? Despite the appearance of another man with a moustache on the world stage the Russians have not yet declared as champions of the free world, so it can hardly be ideological, at least not yet. Both the United States and the USSR are of course big countries with recent histories of rugged pioneering, but sentiment alone is a weak glue in international affairs. The other possibility is shared economic in- terest, as yet dimly perceived. The clue may have been in another event in a busy week, the collapse of the Gatt talks in Brussels last weekend, just as Akiyama's rocket with its strange device circled over- head on its last lap.

Gatt (the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs) has been engaged since 1986 on something called the Uruguay Round, an intermittent trade conference which started off in Montevideo and has, rather slower than a Soviet advertising rocket, been circling the earth ever since. The show played Geneva two weeks ago and last Friday finally touched down in Brus- sels, where ministers and officials of its 107 member nations were supposed to issue a joint declaration announcing further re- ductions in tariffs and other obstacles to world trade, more international com- merce, and happier days for us all.

No declaration was made because no agreement was reached and the talks have been suspended indefinitely. Gatt normal- ly deals with tranquillising technicalities and, because what it does needs a lot more space than editors think its news value justifies, is little known or reported. The organisation goes all the way back to the Bretton Woods meeting of 1944 and is posited on the same thesis, namely that trade barriers cause poverty and so are a fruitful source of discontent, demagoguery and war. Over the years it has been quite successful in talking its members into lowering tariffs on manufactured goods, which averaged around 40 per cent just after the second world war to an average of around 7 pet ,...int today. Nice, if you're a manufacturer.

But Gatt has hi.“1 hardly any success with agricultural products. The Common Agri- cultural Policy of the European Commun- ity with its export subsidies and house-high import barriers on food is in fact flagrantly anti-Gatt, and so is Japan's policy of forbidding the import of a single grain of rice and socking its own consumers five to six times the world price. These policies, prime distorters of world trade because they prevent agricultural countries earning yen or marks to buy European or Japanese products, are stoutly defended primarily in the interests of ten million German and twelve million Japanese farmers — most of whom do their farming at the weekend and hold down factory jobs the rest of the time.

The votes of these old-world hobby farmers are keeping the conservative gov- ernments of Germany and Japan in office, but their privileged labours have another, possibly unintended but equally favourable consequence for the home side. Industrial economies like those of Germany and Japan, exporting everything that isn't bolted down and importing as little as possible, and in particular insisting on growing their own food no matter what it costs, soon run up handsome current- account surpluses which can be spent on building international sales networks for their manufacturers, buying up foreign film studios and investing in impoverished neighbours all the way from Bucharest to Barcelona, Mandalay to Manila. Mein Gott, how the money rolls in and, better yet, stays in. These self-protecting econo- mies can even, should the fancy take them, bankroll the return of separated cousins or rent advertising space on other people's earth-orbiting white elephants.

Why has globe-girdling Gatt tolerated this egocentric conduct all these years? The negotiations have generally threatened to end in stalemate, with the negotiators checking out of their hotels and waving airline tickets when someone would sug- gest that the United States, the world's biggest import market, arbitrate. In those days Germany and Japan were holding the ramparts against communism, remember. Seven times, according to Miss Carla Hills, America's trade representative at the Brus- sels fiasco, the United States gave way in order to preserve its alliances against the USSR. 'Then we didn't have a trade agenda,' she said in Brussels over the weekend. 'Now we do.'

The Brussels conference got as far as a vote on a draft agreement proposing an immediate, minuscule 5 per cent opening of everyone's market to agricultural pro- ducts. This would have amounted in Japan's case to 500,000 tons of rice a year, or about as much as they leave in their bowls to show that they're not greedy. While Japanese and German farmers de- monstrated outside, the Gatt conferees turned it down on the votes of the EEC, Japan and South Korea, Japan's eager apprentice in economic matters. Outside the meeting a senior American official complained, in a voice uncommonly like that of Miss Hills, that the EEC was 'an economic behemoth that has no capacity to make political decisions'. It was, indeed, unlikely that the EEC's Brussels negotia- tions were empowered to overturn the whole basis on which the community was set up just to placate one indignant Amer- ican.

The line-up in Brussels, then, was the EEC (economically dominated by Ger- many), Japan and its Asian acolyte on one side, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, Brazil and Chile on the other. The last group are all highly efficient agricultural producers — before the second world war, in fact they used to feed Europe — and all of them are now hopelessly in debt. America's external debt is pushing on for a trillion dollars, another $39.75 billion trade deficit was ticked up in the July-September quarter and an even bigger one is expected for the current one. Canada owes $40 billion, Australia $112 billion, Argentina, Chile and Brazil a quarter-trillion between them. None of them can even pay the interest on their borrowings by export earnings, so the entire New World is, technically speaking, bankrupt, with Christmas coming and omi- nous signs of recession, if not worse, in the global economy.

These are all capitalist economies, too, and (on the evidence of the last great depression) they will run out of steam even faster than the Old World does when export markets and supplies of capital dry up. Australia, New Zealand and Canada are in fact already well into negative economic growth, the harbinger of a lot worse times just around the corner. In the United States unemployment is up, hous- ing starts are down, and whatever the outcome in the Gulf, Uncle is going to have to pay most of the bills. No wonder a lot of people with rough colonial accents were speaking harshly against Germany and Japan and their closed food market policies in Brussels.

Where does the Soviet Union stand in all this? The USSR is not a member of Gatt but we can readily work out which side would get the Soviets' vote. Like the United States, it is a declining industrial power stuck with an immense military investment for which it now has no practic- al use. Like the United States, its only choices are to tighten its belt (rather tighter than Americans!) or to export its way out of its economic troubles. The arms trade is supposedly in the doldrums and the Soviets, critically short of consumer goods for their own people, certainly have none for export.

However, when a certain Leutnant Schmidt in November 1914 on his own initiative closed the Dardanelles to Russian shipping, he ended a flourishing grain trade that had fed southern Europe since the time of the Roman Empire. Agricul- ture has everywhere been a disaster area under communism but the remedy, private ownership of farms and the distributive system, is already on the agenda in Mos- cow, The Soviets are not going to compete with the Germans and Japanese at slick high-tech consumer exports for a very long while, if ever, but their efforts at improving their own food supplies could conceivably produce an exportable surplus — and, like Canada. the United States, Australia and the rest (and unlike Germany and Japan), they certainly have the space to grow food and graze cattle in.

Germany and its European sidekicks, Japan and its Asian satellites on one side; the New World countries led by the United States plus the Soviet Union, itself a kind of New World country, on the other. Older readers may dimly remember that we have been round this track before, several times in fact. On a previous occasion, we might nervously recall, it took a world war to rescue the New World from economic torpor and triumphantly restore American industrial productivity. Britain, with effi- cient agriculture, an unexigent farm vote and declining manufacturing industry has good reason to be ambivalent, but the die seems to be cast for a small British walk-on part within Europe, or perhaps as Japan's European Korea, if Gatt, against all odds, recovers. In the Gatt breakdown, in short, we may be seeing the outline of a new division of the world, a son and heir for the old cold war.

In the meantime, life goes on. Amateur astronaut Akiyama, by the way, got down safely and cheerfully on Monday after- noon, with Japanese viewers duly impress- ed by Russian efficiency in space and puzzled by their incompetence on earth. All six tree frogs survived the trip and were taken off to mate, a practical test of their undiminished fertility. Last seen they were jumping for joy.

'Don't mind my husband — he eats like a horse.'