Kabun Muto

In an announcement that astonished Tokyo, Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin said here Wednesday that he is willing to visit Japan in late May. Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa immediately welcomed the proposal, which was delivered to him in Tokyo by Russian Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev. He asked Kozyrev to work out details with his Japanese counterpart, Kabun Muto.

President Clinton's proudest foreign policy achievement, his program for massive multinational aid for Russia, has suffered a pair of embarrassing and unexpected setbacks, leaving U.S. officials scrambling to recover. An ambitious Clinton plan to raise $4 billion to reform Russia's giant state-owned enterprises and turn them into private firms abruptly shrunk to an initial $500 million after Japan and other allies balked at the President's price tag, U.S. officials said Wednesday.

A Japanese journalist is under investigation by South Korean authorities for publishing classified documents outlining Seoul's military strategy against a possible North Korean attack. The matter has become a closely watched case of press freedom vs. national security under the new civilian government of President Kim Young Sam.

From Tokyo to L.A. to New York, the Japanese are saying black is beautiful. Trade talk is in the air. Japanese endowments to African-American institutions are rising. You can't be cool in Tokyo without Spike Lee's clothes. The mood has changed on both sides since the mid-1980s, when Japanese officials such as then-Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone offended African-Americans with racially charged comments implying that they have lower intelligence.

Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa, speaking just two weeks after a fellow politician touched off a transpacific row by calling U.S. workers lazy, said Monday that Americans may have lost their work ethic and the drive "to live by the sweat of their brow."

In an effort to jump-start Japan's sluggish economy, the Japanese government Tuesday adopted a record $115-billion package to provide money for everything from burying the rat's nest of overhead electric cables in Tokyo to making more low-interest loans available to home buyers. The package is more than seven times the size of President Clinton's economic stimulus package now blocked in the Senate.

What if General Motors, instead of corporate raider T. Boone Pickens, had invested heavily in Koito Manufacturing, the auto parts supplier that has reluctantly come to symbolize Japan's closed corporate structure? Would the world's largest auto maker get a seat on Koito's board? "Very difficult," said Takao Matsuura, Koito's president. "They'd find out how we receive orders from our Japanese customers; I can't imagine such a situation. We'd never let them put in an officer."

In 1973, when the first oil shock struck, Japan panicked. Housewives scrambled to buy up toilet paper. Diplomats kowtowed to Arab wishes. Before the chaos ended, prices shot through the roof and the gross national product shrank for the first time. But as the world's third oil shock gets under way, panic has struck only Japan's paper economy. Prices on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, which took a beating for three months until the 225-share Nikkei stock index bottomed at 28,002.

Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama today denied tardiness in dispatching troops but confessed to "confusion" in his government's handling of this week's killer earthquake, Japan's worst disaster since World War II. Criticized in Parliament for failing to learn from the lessons of the Jan. 17, 1994, Northridge earthquake, Murayama insisted that one unit of Self Defense Force troops was dispatched "immediately" after an earthquake, initially reported as magnitude 7.

A senior Japanese official conceded Thursday that the government responded too slowly to this week's killer earthquake, Japan's worst disaster since World War II. "I myself consider it very serious that it took so long for us to comprehend the extent of the damage" from Tuesday's quake, said Nobuo Ishihara, deputy chief Cabinet secretary in charge of coordinating the national government's bureaucracy.