Clowns, fools and high Treasury officials

Murray Sayle

Tokyo International conferences are not growing any more productive, but they may, mercifully, be getting shorter. When Henry VIII met Francis I of France on the field of cloth of gold on 7 June, 1520, both monarchs were accompanied by troupes of selected clowns, fools and jugglers, according to a contemporary account, and ten days were passed in the exchange of gifts, jousting, feasts and merriment before the pair got down to serious negotiations.

Mrs Margaret Thatcher is, 'by contrast, arriving in Tokyo this week with a modest retinue of 25, made up exclusively of politicians and bureaucrats, including Sir Geoffrey Howe,Lord Carrington, Sir John Hunt, Chief Secretary of the Cabinet, Sir Michael Palliser, head of the Diplomatic Service, and Sir Kenneth Couzens, a high Treasury official—the last-named clearly a key figure, as this is supposed to be an economic summit, and Sir Kenneth seems to be the only professional economist with the Party. Oh, and Sir Jack Rampton, head of the Department of Energy, and four-and-twenty journalists. The talks are due to last a mere two days, and the only feasts scheduled for Mrs Thatcher are a private grits-and-coffee breakfast with Jimmy Carter at the US Embassy, and a mass dinner with the Emperor and Empress of Japan, once the talks are over and the formal communiqué is safely out on the wires.

Kings Francis and Henry were trying to one-up each other and, incidentally, head off a European war. The heads of government of the seven leading industrialised nations, plus Roy Jenkins of the EEC, have more modest and diffuse aims. First to cobble together, at this late hour, a common front, if not an oil-buyers' cartel, to answer the next turn of the OPEC screw, which is being prepared in Geneva even as the eight fly into Tokyo. Second, if that fails, to make whatever preparations are possible against the world recession likely to follow. Third, to do something about the wretched Vietnamese boat people, who daily face martyrdom in the seas of South-East Asia, and, fourth, any other business.

Earlier this year, it looked as if the only concern of the Summit would be the sins of the Japanese hosts. In 1978 Japan ran a gigantic trade surplus of 11.6 billion dollars with the United States, the biggest in history, and 6.4 billion dollars with the EEC, including an unnerving surplus of 741 million pounds with Britain, a country widely believed not to have that sort of money available for oriental luxuries. All this despite the promise, (or prediction —Japanese is a tricky language) of the former prime minister, Takeo Fukuda, at the London Summit that Japan would stimulate her home economy, throw down the barriers to imports, and sharply reduce the trade surpluses. Ambassadors in Tokyo dropped the heaviest hints, commercial attaches prepared bulging files aimed at charting the wealth and ingenious variety of Japan's non-tariff barriers against free trade. Then Masayoshi Ohira replaced Fukudain a complex scuffle for power inside the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party, and Japan's prospects for the Summit began to improve drastically.

Ohira has devoted most of his waking moments to the Summit ever since he assumed office. On the organisational side, the arrangements have been as impressive as only a Japanese with a stopwatch in hand can make them. Ohira has not gone quite as far as the gilded temporary palaces erected in the Val Dore, but he has managed the modern equivalent — a new exit from the Tokyo'expressway system to speed the foreign potentates from their hotel to the appointed meeting-place. The costly gifts, an area in which Japanese politicians have much experience, are well in hand. Mrs Thatcher, for instance, is to receive a hand-woven kimono worth 2,500 pounds and, although the British Embassy categorically denies that her measurements have passed among the coded diplomatic traffic of recent weeks, it is inconceivable that her Japanese hosts would have underestimated the delicate problem of adapting the Japanese national woman's dress to the European figure.

Private enthusiasm has been equally great. I saw a loudspeaker truck displaying two big, brand-new Union Jacks and the message, 'Welcome Prime Minister Thatcher' while it blasted a scratchy version of 'Colonel Bogey' into the Tokyo equivalent of Bond Street. On a closer look, the truck turned out to belong to the Dai Nippon Aikoku Kai, or Great Japan Patriotic League, a veteran right-wing terrorist group with strong underworld connections stretching back into the Thirties. The field grey vehicle was manned by hired toughs in imitation army uniforms, a nostalgic tribute to the distant days when Japan and Britain were building empires together in the Fat East, and a more modern tribute (probablY over-optimistic) to Mrs Thatcher's tough anti-Soviet stand.

If anyone has cast a gloom on the proceedings, it has been the Japanese police, Following a well-worn ritual, they raided the universities in the Tokyo area and seized, according to their press spokesman, subversive literature and 681 steel pipes, as used by Japanese radicals to settle fine points of doctrinal difference. They then went over the planned festivites with a sour blue pencil, always pleading security risks, and effectively put central Tokyo under two days' martial law. Jimmy Carter, who plan' ned a jog around the Emperor's palace, W25 reduced to a run around the heavilY guarded grounds of the US Embassy, where only his feet could be photographed as theY pounded past the gates. The Japanese police obstructed Carter's access to menv bers of his own press corps, and a meeting' which he had proposed with the citizens of the historic seaport of Shimoda was whittled down, under police direction, to a meeting with the not very exciting mayor of the city and the presentation of bunch of flowers by a hand-picked local gid. From one point of view, commendable zeial in protecting foreign visitors; from another, a sad reminder of how easily Japanese, society can be dominated by an armed an° determined group, even if, in this case, theY are only policemen. Ohira has concerned himself more with what was to happen inside the conference' While Japan's trade surpluses seemed like topless towers, they dominated every other possible topic for discussion, and °hill's, position here was weak. Japan has powerful institutions, like the police and the MinistrY of International Trade and Industry which directs the export drive (the MITI minister, Masumi Esaki, almost managed to get the foreign minister, Sonoda, bumped from the, guest list for the Summit and himseh, included), but the central government itsell is weak, almost powerless, especially io confrontation with the bloated and hyper" efficient Japanese export industries. So the export offensive on two fronts,' Europe and the US, roared on, and " seemed that only an act of God could stopir; This promised a Summit of bitterness anu recrimination, with strong pot-and-kettle, overtones — for the EEC is running a 1), billion dollar trade surplus with the Unite States, imports about as many America° automobiles as Japan does, which is pawn' cally none, and dumps whenever it can int° the US market along with the wiliest of the orientals.

Japan's salvation came, as so often in the past, from an unexpected quarter. The zooming yen (360 yen for a pound sterling last October, 460 yen for the pound todaY) made even Japanese exports hard to sell' and foreign manufactures, if only you co& buy them in Japan, mouth-watering bargains. By April, Japan's trade figures were coming into balance —Ohira pitched himself into the only area where Japanese prime ministers can have much influence, government spending, and in the month of May alone Japan spent more than 4 billion dollars in advance purchases of uranium, raw materials and aircraft. The day has been saved, temporarily —Japan had an all-round trade deficit in May, and the summiteers will be shown graphs which now point unmistakably in the right direction, towards Japanese national bankruptcy. This is not likely to come to pass, however. After this week's OPEC meeting, Japan will have to find about 20 billion dollars a year to pay her oil bill, with Perhaps another 10 billion dollars for basic raw materials. The suppliers of oil and other !raw materials simply cannot absorb this Immense quantity of Japanese goods, even if all the oil sheikhs suddenly took to riding Hondas. Japan has to sell this amount elsewhere, to stay afloat, and the only people who have this kind of money live in Western Europe and the United States. The weakest of the Western economies, those of Britain and the US, are, therefore, the ones which Will have to take the strain of Japan over the long haul. And other Asian economies, all with Japan's problems, are poised for takeoff.

But this grisly prospect is for another summit, another country and possibly for _another US President and British Prime minister. At this precise point in time, Japan's books will pass audit, and Prime Minister Ohira and his advisers have thankfully been able to switch from Japan's weak backhand, trade, to the area of energy — Where Japan has a devastating forehand smash ready for the Western world. The Obvious way to tame the Arabs is to use less of their oil. But Carter and Mrs Thatcher, over their breakfast grits, can survey a common problem: to keep their respective Parties in power, they have to come up with more jobs, which means more economic growth, which means (until someone thinks of a better way) using more oil. Japan is quite differently placed. The Japanese already have the highest propensity to save of anyone in the world; already they are using more than 40 per cent of their oil directly in industrial production, compared with Britain's 25 per cent, and America's 11 per. cent. Tightening the belt, saving and scrimping are the normal Japanese reactions to any of the problems of life, an instinct born of several thousand years' survival on these beautiful but barren islands. A call to economise even more on oil will be particularly welcome to Japanese Industrialists, who can patriotically cut down on heating and air conditioning in their factories (they have, in fact, started already) and use a less high-priced variety in their manufactures. Which will, in turn, help exports.

So Ohira's proposal, already agreed to by Carter, is a target of five per cent reduction on oil consumption by all the industrialised nations. It is easy to forecast who will be wearing the dunces' caps at the next summit — the others, headed by the US, will fail miserably, while Japan will fill and overfill the target. Anyone who gets into a saving contest with Japan is bound to lose. That leaves, on the immediate horizon, only the wretched floating coffins full of Vietnamese. Japan's actions, until recently, were not exactly a candle shining in a naughty world. The Vietnam war, at least the American end of it, was undertaken in defence of an American strategy in Asia whose cap and keystone was the protection of Japan from the hordes of communism. Without contributing a drop of blood (apart from that of a few correspondents, who don't count), Japan's take from the war, including the spending of American soldiers on 'R and R' leave, repairs to American military equipment, and `non-lethal' military procurement was not less than 4 billion dollars, and may have easily doubled that.

Yet, a week ago, Japan had accepted exactly three Vietnamese refugees, all married to Japanese citizens. In a last-minute touch of gloss, the Ohira administration over the weekend announced that this would be raised, over some unspecified time, and on conditions not yet announced, to 500. Small mercy, perhaps, compared with America's 80,000, France's 50,000, Canada's 12,000, Britain's 10,000 and Australia's 13,000, and a flea-bite compared with the quarter-million unwillingly taken in by Thailand and Malaysia. But 500 is still better than three. Or, at least, better public relations. On every other conceivable issue, Japan seems to have a ready excuse for doing nothing. Aid to Turkey is NATO's business, and might annoy the Russians; aid to Hanoi might annoy the Chinese; aid to Egypt might annoy the Arabs; aid to Cambodia might annoy the Vietnamese. Even cheaper Japanese credit for China — cheaper than anyone else is prepared to offer — is really just an expression of the brotherhood of these ancient Confucian civilisations, so difficult for Westerners to fathom, and has absolutely no connection with the vicious Western practice of order-snatching.

On a final proposal, Ohira wants the industrialised world to spend one half of one per cent of GNP on finding substitutes for oil. This sounds, indeed, like the stuff to give the Arabs. It sounds even better to . Japanese industrialists: if coal is the answer, then Australia is the obvious place to build the liquefication plants (Japan 'represents' Australia at the Summit) and Japan is the obvious manufacturer of all the equipment. lithe other summiteers can be convinced that Japanese investment in storage tanks and trans-shipment facilities, to give Japan 150 days' reserve supply of oil, comes somehow under the heading of 'substitution', then Ohira's summit, begun on a rather soggy wicket, will have turned into a dazzling two-day stand for the economic Ashes.

Coolness, nerve, the style that conceals style — only sporting terms seem appropriate to this masterly innings. Yet Masayoshi Ohira is easily the least personally impressive of all the Tokyo summiteers. He is paunchy and short, even for a Japanese, a poor speaker, he seldom smiles, and it is difficult to tell from his official portrait whether he had one, or both eyes shut when it was taken. Reading his autobiography, Some Strokes of the Brush, one finds that a small rice farm on the island of Shikoku was Ohira's equivalent, roughly speaking, of the grocer's shop in Grantham or the struggling little peanut warehouse in Plains. But here the romantic resemblance ends. Ohira has never had to sell himself to anyone as the person to work miracles. His true home is the Okurasho, the Japanese Finance Ministry — like Sir Kenneth Couzens, Ohira is a high Treasury official, and other people have to sell their ideas to him.

The young Ohira served, briefly, in the Japanese government of Occupied China, spent the war years rationing food in Tokyo (where he devised the 'people's taverns', a dodge to keep up the morale of Japanese civilians with industrial alcohol) and, as a Japanese Treasury man assigned to work with the American occupation, learned to keep his eye on the interests of Japan, his mouth shut and his profile low. Ohira used to be nicknamed 'the slow ox', but since he has been obliged to give press conferences, even Japanese children have now taken to calling him `0-san', 'oh' and 'eh' being his standard answers to most questions. He has the vices and virtues typical of bureaucrats: Ohira is cautious, stingy, stubborn, diligent, unimaginative and utterly conscientious at figures and paperwork. Not glamorous qualities, perhaps, but evidently what is needed at international conferences in times of economic turmoil.

What was the outcome, you might be trying to recall, of the original cloth of gold summit? After the temporary palaces were dismantled and the heralds packed Up, not much. Three weeks later, Henry did a private, unpublicised deal with Charles V, Francis's rival. King Francis might have been well advised to leave one of his jugglers at home and take a high Treasury official instead.