Japan: The Hard Sell

Highest-ranking Soviet official ever to visit Japan, First Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan was all smiles under his toothbrush mustache. When he arrived at Tokyo’s International Airport last week, he exuded the folksy, traveling-salesman style that he and his proverb-prattling boss Nikita Khrushchev have made famous. “You have a saying that goes, ‘A good neighbor is better than a distant relative,’ ” he told his hosts. “We live right next door to each other, and our relations should be those of good neighbors.” Some 3,000 Japanese leftists waved red flags in approval, while a smaller group of Japanese rightists jeered: “Go home, Red Devil!” Both groups were outnumbered by the riot police. Fearful of trouble from the same sort of excitable Japanese crowds that had caused President Eisenhower to cancel a visit last summer, some 6,500 police were on hand to protect Mikoyan.

The ostensible reason for Mikoyan’s visit was to open the Soviet Trade Fair in Tokyo’s huge, domed exhibition hall on the Harumi waterfront. The fair was jammed with 9,000 examples of Soviet products, from tractors to Armenian rugs (cooed Armenia-born Mikoyan: “My mother used to make such rugs”). It was also outfitted with an artless array of Soviet propaganda, from pictures of Spacemen Gagarin and Titov to such slogans as “Soviet Union takes the lead in banning nuclear weapons,” and “Hiroshima must not be repeated.” Despite all this, the most popular spot in the hot, humid hall was a booth selling Coca Cola.

Mikoyan’s public grin soon turned into a private growl. Meeting with Japanese Premier Ikeda, he made plain the real reason for his visit: to rail against U.S. military bases in Japan. “Japan is tied to the United States through a security pact that is in fact an aggressive military pact,” snarled the salesman, adding that if the Berlin crisis led to war, Japan, because of its U.S. bases, could expect a Russian attack. However, said Mikoyan, “we are making every effort to prevent war.” Then he proposed to Ikeda that Russia and Japan sign a 15-to 20-year trade agreement, including the immediate order of some $200 million worth of Japanese machinery for Russia’s Siberian development plan.

Much as the Japanese, who trade to live, were tempted by the Russian offer, at week’s end there were sure signs that Mikoyan’s tough talk had gone too far. Japan’s normally effete press bristled with outrage; virtually every major newspaper attacked Mikoyan’s meddling. Headlined one: JAPAN GETS RUN-AROUND FROM ANASTAS. Tokyo’s Shimbun warned that Mikoyan’s “parrotings of repeated threats by Premier Khrushchev” were no way to “make any sales.” In a slap at a visiting statesman that was unprecedented for the polite Japanese, Ikeda’s party issued a statement branding Mikoyan’s threats as an “interference in Japan’s domestic affairs.” It went on to hint that Mikoyan might very well go home emptyhanded: “Utilizing an expansion of trade through a Soviet trade fair to promote a pro-Soviet attitude while making threats backed by military force is part of the Soviet Union’s peculiar peace offensive.”