The Orphan of Asia

Sipping green tea in his 30-room official residence last week. Premier Nobusuke Kishi ignored the dangling ropes and scaffolds outside his open window as workmen installed air conditioning on an upper floor. Even when a heavy window frame slipped from a worker's hand and landed with a splintering crash on the ground, the smooth flow of Kishi's talk and his relaxed manner did not change.

Kishi would need all his aplomb in the coming month as he tours eleven countries in Europe and the Americas. His object : to gain face for his countrymen, who morbidly nurse a national feeling that Japan, while growing economically strong, is still "the orphan of Asia," disliked by its neighbors, ignored or discounted by the West. Sensitive Japanese are already wincing at the journalists' jeers in England at the discovery that a London public relations firm had been hired to boost the Premier's stock there. Other Japanese fear a disaster like the visit to London of Foreign Minister Aiichiro Fujiyama, who insisted on making a TV appearance. When, with the camera on him, he was shown a box of Japanese ball bearings that copied a well-known British brand and was asked what he had to say, Fujiyama indignantly stalked out, while his agitated aide cried: "Japan has been insulted!"

It took a tactful explanation from the British embassy to convince Premier Kishi that during his tour he should not attempt to lay a wreath at London's Cenotaph, the memorial to Britain's war dead. Unable to understand why the world is not willing to let bygones be bygones, the Japanese complain that they are not treated as equals, like the Germans, whose war guilt, they argue, was at least as great as their own.

There is a constant hoarding of rebuffs. Australia's Foreign Minister Richard Casey was recently in Tokyo, and things went swimmingly until he was asked when Australia would admit a limited number of Japanese. Said Casey: "Never!" Commented a bitterJapanese: "Australia bars Asians; Japan has 1,500,000 abortions a year to hold the population down to tolerable levels. The 'White Australia' policy is only made possible by Japanese self-restraint."

In industrial products as well as babies, the Japanese are adopting self-restraint as a national policy. Textile exports to the U.S. and Europe are voluntarily controlled to avoid provoking tariff quotas; export licenses are refused for inferior articles in an effort to upgrade the longstanding Japanese reputation for poor workmanship and imitative design. In his effort to convince the West that Japan deserves less suspicion and more comradeship, Kishi can boast that his nation is the most democratic in Asia, has the highest literacy rate, and possesses a competent work force whose real wages have risen 20% in the past five years.

Kishi is carrying with him a suitcase full of decorations (ranging from the Supreme Order of the Chrysanthemum to Orders of the Rising Sun and the Sacred Treasure), and also awillingness to listen attentively to "frank expressions of views" from leaders of the West. Some of his problems:

> In West Germany, businessmen fume at the flood of well-made Japanese binoculars, microscopes and cameras that not only crowd German products abroad but are making inroads at home. Steelmen in the Ruhr are disturbed at the recent appearance of competitively priced Japanese rolled steel in European markets. Premier Kishi will try to soothe ruffled feelings by pointing out that Japan buys more than twice as much from West Germany as it sells her.

> In Britain, the mention of Japanese imports sets business tempers flaring. Last year some manufacturers refused to let a 19-man Japanese delegation view their new lines at the Brighton Toy Fair because "they come here to copy our designs and then undersell us with cheap reproductions." British textile manufacturers complain of deceptive Japanese labeling. But, says one trade official: "Let's face it. Their goods have improved tremendously in quality, and they no longer have to copy our designs." Basic British complaint: Japanese wages are only 35% of the average British wage.

Premier Kishi can point out that the Japanese government is honestly fighting against unethical practices. Last year the government itself sponsored an exhibition of horrible examples of design stealing by Japanese manufacturers in order to help eliminate this blot on Japan's business reputation

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