For New Japan Envoy, Economics Is Key
Even before the Senate considered his nomination as U.S. ambassador to Japan, Michael H. Armacost traveled the country to talk to U.S. business executives-a visible sign of the new importance economics and trade holds in the relationship between Tokyo and Washington.</br></br>Armacost, who leaves today to take up his new post, said he told the executives that "they can count on the American government and its diplomats when they are encountering real obstacles rather than problems of their own making. They can expect the government to be helpful." "The American ambassador has to regard himself as the first commercial officer of the embassy," Armacost, 52, said during his Senate Foreign Relations Committee confirmation hearing.</br></br>Under Armacost's predecessor in Japan during the past 12 years, Mike Mansfield, trade grew in importance. But it still was secondary in embassy affairs to more traditional diplomatic aims of maintaining the security ties between the two countries.</br></br>While giving greater emphasis to economic issues, Armacost made it plain that he means to keep a lid on trade frictions before they become serious enough to undermine what Mansfield called the most important bilateral relationship in the world.</br></br>Armacost yesterday told foreign journalists-largely Japanese reporters-that he wants to contribute to the discussion of trade differences "in a kind of low-key, cool, objective way that avoids histrionics and hyperbole and a lot of unnecessary nationalism on both sides."