Andrei Goes Courting

For the past five years, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko had simply been "too busy" to keep his end of a 1965 agreement calling for annual talks with the Japanese. All of a sudden, Gromyko is not too busy at all. From the moment he arrived at Tokyo's International Airport last week for a six-day stay, the normally dour Russian was the epitome of diplomatic affability.

Flashing uncharacteristic smiles, he toured a Toyota plant, called on Emperor Hirohito (with Mrs. Gromyko in tow) and magnanimously agreed to the release of 14 Japanese fishermen whom the Soviets had accused of poaching in Russia's territorial waters.

There was nothing mysterious about the Foreign Minister's sudden affection for Japan. With President Nixon about to leave for Peking, and Tokyo-Washington relations still strained over the U.S. economic and diplomatic shokkus, it was obviously a good moment for the Soviets to reopen their dialogue with the Japanese.

For their part, the Japanese were eager for a little courting from the Soviets, if only to give both Washington and Peking something to think about. Even so, that did not mean that Gromyko would find the courting easy. About all he managed to wangle out of Japanese Premier Eisaku Sato and Foreign Minister Takeo Fukuda was an agreement to begin negotiations some time this year on the peace treaty that has been languishing on the agenda ever since the two countries formally ended their state of war in 1956.

Rocky Islands. To get their peace treaty, the Soviets will almost certainly have to make some kind of concession on at least two of the four rocky islands just north of Hokkaido that the Japanese claim are not part of the Soviet Kurile Island chain. Until now, the Russians, who captured the disputed islands in the final days of World War II, have been adamant about keeping jurisdiction over them.

Other interested parties have been angling for Tokyo's attention. In Peking, Chinese Premier Chou En-lai let it be known that China would support Japan's claim to the disputed islands, for whatever that was worth. In Washington, meanwhile, President Nixon appointed Robert S. Ingersoll, 58, chairman of the Borg-Warner Corp., as the new U.S. Ambassador to Japan to replace Armin Meyer, a career diplomat. Ingersoll has no foreign policy experience, but he is a driving, early-to-work industrialist who has built a family-controlled Chicago manufacturing business into a $1.2 billion conglomerate with global interests, including five joint ventures in Japan. The Japanese will find that Ingersoll has a passion for detail, a Nixonian conviction that the U.S. must not be "outsold" in world markets and, in contrast to Meyer, close ties to the White House.

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