Japan

Well, well, well! Now that the fighting in the Persian Gulf is over, Japan comes riding to the rescue, astride a metaphorical white stallion like the one the emperor used to ride, offering $9 billion to help pay for war costs.Mind you, even though Japan gets an irreplaceable share of its petroleum from the Persian Gulf, the country nevertheless didn't send a single soldier or sailor to fight, and, for that matter, sent support groups such as medics only in laughably small numbers. At the outset the Japanese promised to help foot the bill for the operation, but these promises tended to be as evanescent as Japan's promises to lift trade barriers.

There cannot be much hope that Japan will agree to overhaul the trade imbalance with the U.S. in talks in Tokyo on June 27-28. Or that the Group of Seven summit in Tokyo on July 7-9 will bring a new trilateral understanding among North America, Europe and Japan.Japan is distracted by a political crisis without precedent in its postwar history. It will go to the summit represented by a prime minister, Kiichi Miyazawa, who has just been humiliated by a no-confidence vote caused by defectors in his all-powerful but all-tottering Liberal Democratic Party.

In rejecting political reforms, the Liberal Democratic troglodytes of Japan's House of Councilors or upper house of parliament have not merely canceled the mandate of the August election to the lower house. The political crisis they brought about cripples the government's ability to face the economic crisis, a recession that has seen share and property prices halved in three years. It is now doubtful that Prime Minster Morihiro Hosokawa can bring about the stimulus package he promised.The crisis also cripples Japan's ability to negotiate.

There is reassuring news of sorts for Americans from recession-plagued Japan. The troubled Mazda Motor Corp., which is one-fourth owned by Ford Motor Co., is going to get greater Ford representation on its board and Ford executives full-time.Ford bought its stake in Mazda in 1979, and imported Japanese techniques of quality control and cost control from the association. But the high yen and American industry recovery of market share have taken the superiority myth from many Japanese firms.

It will take more than a sunny meeting between President Bush and Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu to smooth over the troubled American-Japanese relationship. While the two government chiefs dutifully put their emphasis on blandness rather than bashing during their short summit in California last week, they could not wish some very real irritants out of existence.At the top of the list is trade friction, emphasized only recently by Japanese threats to arrest American rice exporters trying to display their wares in Tokyo and by Japan's perch at the top of a U.S. list of unfair trading nations.

The devastating earthquake near Kobe yesterday showed that the Japanese know less about earthquakes than they had thought. This is bad news for others in highly developed areas prone to earthquakes, particularly California and Italy, because the Japanese probably know more than anyone else.Measuring 7.2 on the Richter scale, the Kobe quake had a known death toll yesterday of 1,800 and climbing, 1,000 missing, more than 6,000 injured and 70,000 displaced from more than 8,000 damaged or destroyed buildings.

Just two weeks after the IndyCar series races through the streets of Baltimore on Labor Day, it will race on a road course near the Twin Ring Motegi motorsports facility after the track suffered damage from the March earthquakes. IndyCar made the announcement this morning. The race will be run on 2.98-mile, natural-terrain road course during its final visit to Twin Ring Motegi on Sept. 18. The facility was the site of Danica Patrick's only IndyCar win, the Japan 300 in 2008.

While the Tokyo stock market meanders at its lowest levels in six years, Wall Street punctured the 3300-mark for the first time yesterday. Does this mean that the Japanese economy is in worse shape than the American? Don't believe it. The U.S. recession is for real, reflecting structural defects that signal declining influence worldwide; the Japanese recession is primarily a healthy, deliberate, government-induced puncturing of a speculative bubble.Indeed, the Japanese recession in many ways is the kind of recovery the U.S. would dearly like to have.

WHILE JAPAN'S ruling coalition squeaked through with a narrow victory in the parliamentary elections last month, it barely covers up some deep structural problems that are badly in need of fixes if the country is to keep on course as Asia's most stable democracy and America's chief ally in the Pacific. First, Japan's decade-long recession shows no signs of ending as Japanese consumers, unlike their American counterparts who are bullish about the future, choose to save, rather than spend, their money.

ANNIVERSARIES, such as the 50th anniversary of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, offer an appropriate moment for reflection -- not to rekindle old anger or open aging wounds but to use our knowledge of history to look with increased understanding into the future.Unfortunately, it is especially difficult for the Japanese to take such a look because Japan's educational system refuses to acknowledge the country's behavior in the years leading up to World War II. Absent is a record of the subjugation and slaughter of civilians in China and Korea.