RATHE BRIEF VISIT to this country of Mr. Nobosuke Kishi,
the Japanese Prime jrNinister, who arrives on Sunday, is being lhandled by a public-relations firm whose &American opposite numbers succeeded, when he was in the United States, in getting him a game of golf with President
Eisenhower.
Both the British and Japanese govern- mtments must be hoping that our own experts din the arts of persuasion will prove as successful, by eliciting a measure of cordiality in the British public's welcome to Mr. Kishi. The British government and its advisers know that sooner or later it will --lave to conclude the long-term commercial treaty with Japan that it promised in 1955,
when Japan was accepted into GATT, and we invoked article XXXV of the agreement to apply quota limitations, for the time being, and as a sop to interested parties here, on Japanese goods.
The treaty will have to be concluded eventually because Japan, to a greater extent even than Britain, must export if it is to maintain its living standards, and we cannot impede the material progress of the only fully industrialised Asian country, and the only one, besides India, to have— more or less—made democratic institutions work. Or if we do, and if an American recession were to mean fewer exports to the United States of Japanese cameras, lighters, radios, and cottons, it will only be to encourage those opposition elements in Japan who are always pointing out that the economically obvious customer for Japanese manufactured goods is China.
But it is well understood by the govern- ment here that wartime resentments, and British manufacturers'—especially Lancashire manufacturers'—fears of Japanese competition, are still too strong for any substantial gesture to be made towards Mr. Kishi this time round. All it can hope is that he will make an agreeable enough first impression to help rub out the memories of the prison camps, and to prepare the way for an attempt to persuade manufacturers that (in spite of a celebrated television interview, a couple of years ago, in which Mr. Fujiyama, the Japanese Foreign Minister was confronted with Oriental ball-bearings that were packaged as though they were Occidental) the generality of Japanese goods are no longer the low-cost, low-grade, imitations that used to present 'unfair' competition between the wars.
As for Mr. Kishi, he too will hope to be able to show the Japanese people—before he goes off to Bonn, Vienna, Rome, Paris, and Rio de Janeiro: he is an inveterate traveller—that London was, at any rate, receptive to what he himself refers to as his 'economic diplomacy.' He has been having a rough passage at home, where his Liberal- Democratic party is deeply split, and not particularly liberal, and his cabinet a makeshift, and where the Socialist oppo- sition and the trade unions successfully combined, only a few months ago, to make him think again about giving undemo- cratically wide powers to the police. Both the Socialists and the Communists, who form a redoubtable Popular Front in Japan when they choose to gang up on the Liberal-Democrats, are opposed to the new security treaty with the United States, now being negotiated by Mr. Fujiyama. So Mr. Kishi will hope to be able to offer the Japanese public some hint, at least, of commercial blessings to come from Britain, to make up for what his political opponents will be saying soon about his truckling to the United States.
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