Moving the Goal Posts on Japan : Bush says Tokyo is making progress; Congress disagrees. Who’s right?

Japan-bashers in Congress, led by House majority leader Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.), have been noisily calling on the Bush Administration to again this year label Japan an unfair trading partner, arguing that not to do so would be to waffle at the very time that a policy of hard negotiating backed by congressionally threatened punitive tariffs is starting to pay off. President Bush, taking the advice of Carla A. Hills, the tough-minded U.S. trade representative, has rejected that demand. He was right to do so, and congressional trade hawks would be right to back off and give the recent progress made in U.S.-Japan trade talks a chance to show results.

The last few weeks have seen an impressive list of agreements reached on a number of enduring and irritating trade disputes. The latest came in Tokyo the other day when Japan agreed to remove barriers on imports of wood products, long a protected area in the Japanese economy. Earlier, after much foot-dragging, Japan agreed to open its markets to supercomputers and satellites, two low-volume but high-cost products in which the United States excels.

Additionally, Japan has promised to take steps to ease so-called structural impediments, informal but often potent barriers to foreign goods seeking to enter the domestic market. For instance, steps are to be taken to reform Japan’s near-feudal product distribution system, to overhaul its archaic pricing methods and to enforce laws against connivance by businesses to perpetuate monopoly practices.

None of this, admittedly, will make much of an immediate dent in the $49-billion trade surplus Japan still runs with the United States. But it does represent an important shift in attitudes and in official policy. Congressional critics of Japan’s trade practices would be doing a key ally as well as their own government an injustice if they fail to recognize the political and economic significance of the changes that Tokyo has pledged to make.