LETTERS: U.S. FLEXIBILITY NEEDED IN JAPAN TRADE TALKS

To the editor:

U.S. government trade negotiations with Japan (namely the declared intent to impose 100 percent tariffs on Japanese luxury cars on June 28) seem to me to highlight recent government failures to identify and adopt a recognizably American style of negotiation at international bargaining tables. What I have read of fixed (and unilateral) U.S. positions now and in the past sound more like the Japanese custom of "consensus" than the U.S. custom of Yankee know-how.

I spent 12 months in Japan in 1995-95. Although I did not obtain anything like real fluency in the Japanese language, I read many English-language but Japanese-edited and Japanese-published newspapers. The sum of what I understood of the Japanese view of American leadership (from a liberal point of view) was this: Americans have a knack for the flexible, the innovative, for breaching barriers imposed by bureaucracy, for just getting the job done and not worrying overly about formalities. And the major standout between the two countries still seems to me to be this U.S. informality (flexibility) as opposed to the very understandable formality (inflexibility) of the 3,000-year-old Japanese culture.

To me, therefore, of all the cultural contributions the United States might be able to supply our long-time political ally, Japan, would be to loosen up and act like the innovative Yankees we are supposed to be when the chips are down. The U.S. negotiators could give some breathing room to negotiations and stop trying to imitate the Japanese.

ALAN NASLUND

Cape Girardeau