Zhu, Obuchi head for U.S. with variety of sales

By Edward Neilan

TOKYO (JP): The world's two most influential traveling salesmen are heading for the United States soon, their suitcases overflowing with products and policies which they want to sell to Uncle Sam.

Or to get him to affix his seal of approval.

Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji, the former Shanghai mayor, is due to show up at the White House April 8 in the glare of media attention over China's human rights record, charges that its spies have been pilfering U.S. nuclear secrets, its promising trade and development outlook, and its chances of getting into the World Trade Organization (WTO) while keeping Taiwan out.

All of this is against a backdrop of a renewed and burgeoning U.S. domestic debate over whether "engagement" or "containment" is the best way to deal with a newly-awakened tiger.

Japanese Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi will arrive in Washington about one month later, during what Japanese call the "Golden Week" holiday, for the first state visit by a Japanese prime minister in 12 years.

(Asked what is the difference between a state visit and merely an "official" visit of which there have been many, a Japanese diplomat said "During a State Visit they shoot more guns on the White House lawn.").

The United States, Japan and China are the world's three most exciting countries -- perhaps also the most important -- for a lot of reasons.

Obuchi presides over the world's number two national economy in value, and Japan has the globe's largest foreign exchange reserves at US$221.5 billion. Japan's per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is $23,105 for a population of 126.3 million.

Zhu's China has $145 billion in the bank, has a per capita GDP of $3,650 for 1,246.9 billion population -- about 10 times as many people as Japan.

Endless statistics are available to characterize the similarities and differences of the respective leaders and their visits.

But you can't pinch statistics nor smell them; evaluation of a scene by instinct and perceived charisma is not enough. Anecdotes often are more meaningfully descriptive than yardsticks.

The United States gets high marks for providing the open markets in which Japan and China can flourish, a fact more statute than quarterly trade figures.

Political scientists will be staying awake at night calculating the benefits accruing to each of the nations following the visits. There will be advance predictions of "who will win" not unlike football prognostications.

As usual, Canada's Marshall MacLuhan has the last word: "The medium is message." The reality that Zhu and Obuchi are going to Washington is more important than what will be said there.

If further symbolism is demanded, please note that both Zhu and Obuchi will be arriving in U.S.-made Boeing 747 jet aircraft.

(New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, in a Tokyo speech recently, said his research shows it is matter of fact that no two nations which have McDonald's fast food hamburger restaurants have ever fought a war against each other.)

By all odds, Zhu and China will get more press attention on the upcoming visits, than will Obuchi and Japan.

This despite the fact that the United States and Japan have more cooperative projects underway than any two sovereign nations have ever had in history -- from the formal "Common Agenda" to backpackers' guidelines to manuals on zoo culture.

At this point in time, the pendulum positions China as more exciting and uncertain to the American psyche, which is unable to embrace more than one Asian giant at a time as its "favorite." Japan is more and more of a known factor to Americans, therefore perhaps just a bit boring or predictable.

It is the American public and media psyche that are fickle, not the Japanese or Chinese international demeanor.

While on home leave recently, Japanese Ambassador to the United States Kunihiko Saito told a Tokyo audience that he had become tired of seemingly endless American public official and press criticisms and advice on Japan. Saito, generally soft- spoken but with a reputation for marksmanship in debates, asked an American journalist to explain the negative reporting on Japan.

"If one fully-loaded New York-Dallas plane crashes, that's news," the American journalist pointed out. He added "On the other hand, if all 40 New York-Dallas daily flights arrive safely, that's not news."

The explanation was astute. There hasn't been a plane crash in U.S.-Japan relations in a long time.

The writer is a Tokyo-based veteran analyst of Northeast Asian affairs and a media fellow at Hoover Institution, Stanford University.