Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, January 10, 1992 TAG: 9201100068
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: TOKYO LENGTH: Medium
JAPAN TALKS BLASTED
President Bush left for home today with a Japanese offer to buy more American cars and $10 billion more in auto parts, but the carmakers he brought with him denounced the Japanese pledges as woefully inadequate.Even Bush administration officials were saying that the arrangements worked out in the long and often bitter negotiations fell far short of meeting the goals set by the White House for improving American exports to Japan and thus creating more jobs in the United States.
The presidential party nonetheless contended that the talks were useful in drawing more attention to the continuing dispute over the trade in autos between the United States and Japan.
Bush on Thursday announced the Japanese pledges to buy more American cars and $10 billion more in auto parts yearly by 1995, from $9 billion now to $19 billion in three years.
The results on the auto issues - the core of American anger over Japan's trading system - symbolized an economic summit meeting that appeared to throw cold water on Bush's election-year promises of new export markets and new jobs, and left his reputation for strength and vitality sapped by a dramatic physical collapse.
Administration officials sought in their subsequent briefings to portray the Japanese pledges in a sympathetic light, but the Big Three auto executives, who accompanied Bush as part of a delegation of 18 business leaders, were quick to denigrate it, often in quite strong terms.
"There is no agreement," said Harold Poling, president of the Ford Motor Co.
He said the Japanese were unwilling to commit to a schedule to lower their $50 billion trade surplus with the United States, three-quarters of which comes from automobile trade. "The proposals on the table as far as the auto industry is concerned are inadequate."
The president's meetings with Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa produced a stack of real and tentative agreements on trade and security issues.
They included specific proposals to increase American shares of Japanese markets for products and services like paper, government-bought computers, glass, construction and legal assistance. The sides also agreed that Japan would take steps to remove hidden trade barriers - like the arcane safety and testing standards for autos - that raise the price of foreign cars being sold in the Japanese market.