Word: miyazawa
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EVER SINCE HIS JULY ELECTION, KNOWing oddsmakers had doubted that Morihiro Hosokawa could keep his promise to write corruption out of the unofficial rulebook of Japanese politics. Two Prime Ministers before him, Kiichi Miyazawa and Toshiki Kaifu, lost the job trying to accomplish that feat, and the Diet was full of wily politicians determined that Hosokawa would fare no better. But the doubters underestimated the extent to which the scion of an aristocratic landowning family was a politician of a new stripe. Nor did the skeptics anticipate that Hosokawa's unprecedented popularity would give him the authority he needed...
...Miyazawa is a Class C war criminal," said Seiichi Ota, a young member of the Liberal Democratic Party, in a coldly measured tone. Frowns of consternation crossed the faces of the party Old Guard at the head of the table. "The public detests the look and smell of the L.D.P.!" warned Jinen Nagase, a party man from western Japan. Defying the tradition that youth must respect age, junior members of Japan's long-ruling party turned last week's postmortem session about the historic loss at the polls into a brawl of nasty taunts and fraying tempers. It was time...
Consequently, it was Miyazawa who made the key concession that led to the summit's greatest achievement. When Miyazawa overruled his Finance Ministry to announce that Japan would eliminate tariffs on "brown" liquors such as whiskey and Cognac, all the pieces fell into place. The seven signed off on the greatest tariff reductions ever achieved through international agreement. In addition to those on some liquors, tariffs will be wiped out on pharmaceuticals, construction equipment, medical equipment, steel and beer. ("Does this mean I get a better price for Molson's back in Washington?" Clinton joked to an aide. Probably...
...reducing Japan's enormous surpluses in trade with the U.S. (nearly $50 billion a year currently). But negotiators argued through two nights, indulging in such hairsplitting quarrels over wording that at one point Clinton exclaimed, "You mean I flew all the way across the Pacific to negotiate this?" Miyazawa ordered his bargainers not to let Clinton go away empty-handed, and they complied -- though only after arguing so fiercely among themselves that two Japanese officials got into a fistfight in the Okura Hotel at 3 a.m. Saturday...
Negotiations continued until 8:30, as, according to U.S. bargainers, the Japanese started "backsliding" on some concessions. Clinton was so worried about how the Japanese would present the pact that he insisted on seeing a text of Miyazawa's prepared remarks before joining in a press conference to break the news. He got a text -- in Japanese; with no time to prepare a written translation, interpreter Jim Zumwalt had to read one aloud...