Letter to Henry K.

Fresh from stage-managing the Moscow summit, Henry Kissinger is scheduled to fly to Japan this week on a less dramatic but still pressing mission: mending fences with the U.S.'s most important Asian ally. Ever since last summer, when Japan learned to its astonishment that Nixon's adviser had gone to Peking to arrange a presidential visit about which Tokyo had not even been informed, the Japanese have become increasingly convinced--rightly or wrongly--that some personal Kissinger bias has had a role in shaping what they see as a harsh and misguided new U.S. policy direction. Tokyo's pique (or paranoia) has only been exacerbated by the fact that Kissinger turned aside several official invitations to visit, finally agreed to a "private" trip and then postponed it twice. In an open letter to the President's emissary, TIME'S Tokyo bureau chief spells out why the Japanese are upset:

Dear Dr. Kissinger, Just about everyone here in Tokyo will be relieved to finally see you step off that plane that seems to have become your second home. Still another postponement of your first visit to Japan since moving into the White House would harden the Japanese suspicion that you attach no urgency at all to the U.S.'s relations with the world's third economic power. Through Japan's photochemical smog, you'll be seeing a paradoxical country where islands of quiet and beauty coexist with urban sprawl, and where modernization has never meant Westernization. Japanese society is awesomely purposive; yet it is now groping uncertainly for its role in a drastically changed international setting.

Though they will veil it with courtesy, the reason the Japanese have been so eager to get you here is that they regard you as an important part of their problem. They link your name to the "China shokku" of last July whose traumatic impact far exceeded the economic shocks that followed. Having stuck to an increasingly controversial policy of support for Nationalist China at our behest, they felt doublecrossed and deliberately outflanked. Since then, the Japanese have heard that you hold rather harsh and fatalistic views about them generally--that while for the time being they have only the U.S. to turn to, they will over the long run head inevitably in a nationalist and nuclear direction.

Even on a personal level, no one has ever heard you rhapsodize about the conceptual sweep of Japanese leaders the way you have done in the case of Chou Enlai. They do indeed tend to be rather bland men, practical and often frustratingly didactic. But it is still impressive how far they have moved their nation in the past two decades.

In short, you are widely regarded as anti-Japanese. This should not put you in a defensive mood (not that you are much given to that posture), for this would merely compound the mutual suspicions. Nor should you believe that the mere gesture of devoting four days of your precious time to them will convince the Japanese that you really regard them as the U.S.'s "most important ally in Asia." Your hosts would like instead some clear answers on how they fit into the Nixon-Kissinger scheme of a multipolar power balance. Although their feelings are ambivalent, they are mainly frightened by Nixon's much discussed concept of a world with five power centers--the U.S., the Soviet Union, China, Europe and Japan--each "balancing the other."

Though they hate to give up a relationship that was so cozy and comfortable for so long, the Japanese have come to accept your thesis that their long near-total reliance on Washington's leadership is now obsolete--a relic of the cold war era when there were just two antagonistic giants, each with its own cluster of clients. But while they welcome a little more independence, the Japanese fear that the new five-power future espoused by the President could be as unworkable as the old two-power world. As they see it, Nixon's (and your) new world is already so lopsided as to rule out any real likelihood that the "even balance" of power that the President talks about will ever emerge.

Then, too, the Japanese worry that their own peculiar national style is not suited to a new freewheeling era of rapid shifts and realignments. In Japan, policy is not shaped by a few dynamic leaders at the top (as in Washington or Peking), but through a slow process of consensus reached within a large--and largely anonymous--Establishment. To an insular nation like Japan, where xenophobia is never far beneath the surface, the psychological alternative to the haven of a steady alliance is a return to defiant self-reliance. Sometimes they fear that, inadvertently, you may be pushing them in this direction. Already, they suspect that you regard the U.S.-Japan security treaty more as a means of containing Japan than China and the Soviet Union.

Concert of Powers. One Japanese concern exceeds all others. Since the four other members of the President's concert of powers are already nuclear, the Japanese detect an implication that eventually they are to go nuclear as well. That prospect frightens Asia. It has also put Tokyo at a disadvantage with Peking, which has been able to make life extremely uncomfortable for Premier Eisaku Sato's government by playing on Asian fears of Japanese remilitarization. As Peking is aware, no one is more worried about nuclearization than the Japanese themselves. Such a step to them spells continued hostility from China and a serious obstacle to the process of accommodation that Japan has successfully followed since the war to safeguard its far-flung supply lines and markets. This is not just the symptom of a passing "nuclear allergy." It is the sober assessment of a crowded island nation that knows it can be wiped out by a couple of H-bombs on Tokyo and Osaka and is not about to pay the vast economic and political price for nuclear status symbols that have as much reality as the Emperor's new clothes.

Thus the need for a close and considerate American partnership with Japan is undiminished. Of course you have every right and reason to remind the Japanese that they must pull their weight. Under the threat of another trade and monetary crisis, they are at last realizing that they cannot continue piling up vast trade surpluses and treat development aid as a kind of export promotion. You will surely warn them of the political spillover effects if they fail to follow through on this promptly. You should also press them (again) to do something about that bureaucratic screen that they have used, for far too long, to protect their industries from outside competition. In the end, of course, the root of our trade deficit is the sad state of American competitiveness--and that is our problem, not theirs.

The fact that you are coming is a hopeful sign that you may not be as fatalistic about Japan's future as you have been made out to be. Considering the profound influence that the U.S. has exerted on Japan ever since the arrival of Commodore Perry's black ships, that would be an oddly antihistorical view. What is more, the fatalism could turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Sincerely,

Herman Nickel

P.S. It may be small comfort, but light fish and rice dishes are the thing here. However unhappy your hosts may be with U.S. policy, they are not likely to retaliate with anything like those 18-course banquets that the Chinese hurled at your diet in Peking.

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