REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK : Of $7 Hamburgers, Hairdos, Celestial Bodies

TOKYO —  Welcome to the home of the $2.50 cup of iced tea.

Also, the $10.90 cab fare to go the equivalent of three U.S. blocks in a crowd of Toyotas and Hondas. The $7 “summit hamburger” at the Akasaka Prince Hotel’s Potomac Coffee Shop. The $50 lunch. The $300-a-night “discounted” hotel room.

So maybe it’s the foreigners who have flooded Tokyo to cover the Group of Seven summit who should be asking for foreign aid?

One day into the meeting, the thousands of foreign journalists, technicians and other summiteers were already painfully aware of their limited buying power.

Could that have been one of the reasons behind Hillary Rodham Clinton’s frugality? According to Anthony Lake, the President’s national security adviser, the First Lady was accompanied here by a hairdresser, Sylvan Melloul from a Washington beauty parlor.

Flown over on Air Force One as a guest of the Clintons and lodged at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo, Melloul charges $17 an appointment, Lisa Caputo, Mrs. Clinton’s press secretary said.

Tokyo, obviously, is not meant to see a repeat of the “Hair Force One” affair sparked by President Clinton’s $200 haircut in his jetliner at Los Angeles International Airport.

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“Time is money” is supposed to be one of the maxims of the capitalist world.

What, then, did the Japanese think when President Clinton, notorious inside the Beltway for his tardiness, showed up 22 minutes late to deliver a speech at Waseda University on Wednesday? He offered no explanation or apology.

But it is Clinton’s Russian opposite number, Boris N. Yeltsin, whose lateness has the Japanese overtly ticked off and waiting for a public apology.

Millions here will be listening when Yeltsin arrives in Japan today.

As Russian president, Yeltsin has never set foot in Japan. Scheduled visits twice fell through because Yeltsin decided the domestic heat wasn’t worth the risk of dealing with the territorial dispute over four small islands that also turned Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s sole state visit to Tokyo into a debacle in April, 1991.

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Clinton is also getting some lessons in what it means to be a political leader in the electronic age. He came out on stage at an auditorium at Waseda University with the university’s president, Chumaru Toyama, and clasped his hands to wait for the educator to introduce him.

It turned out to be a five-minute introduction, and when it finally ended, Clinton confessed he hadn’t understood a word of it--except several references to the late Robert F. Kennedy. Clinton forgot to wear his electronic earphone providing simultaneous translation.

Kennedy visited the university in 1962 and 1964 as attorney general and made a donation that is still funding scholarships for students.

The campus was also the site of an image bump for the visiting VIP: During the question-and-answer period after his speech Wednesday morning, a student asked Clinton about the U.S. bombing of Iraq. Once more, the President had been caught without his earphone, and the cameras caught him grinning inappropriately as the concerned student posed her question.

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Japan is famed for the ability of its culture to adapt to novel demands.

Witness Tanabata, the Star Festival, celebrated in most of the country this week.

Two stars, the Japanese legend goes, are in love but are allowed to meet across the Milky Way only once a year. For Tanabata, praying for the celestial bodies’ happy reunion, people hang long, narrow strips of paper on branches of bamboo on which they have written romantic verse.

In all years, it seems, except this.

In the lobby of the Okura Hotel, which houses Clinton and his entourage, guests were invited to decorate an interior garden with their own Tanabata wishes.

Some spoke of love, others of politics.

“May the world stay peaceful and quiet(er) so we can all go home to sleep earlier.”

“Re: Summit ‘93: Results not rhetoric!”

“May the River of Love flow as freely as a newly thawed spring.”

And: “I want this summit to be over now!”