Japan

The United States will not soon get satisfaction in its trade dispute with Japan and will have to delay ultimatums about sanctions. At the moment, there is no one in Japan with the authority to make concessions, and it may be a prolonged moment. The resignation of Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa leaves confusion and weakness at least until a successor is named, and probably longer. Meanwhile, the system moves along under the lubrication of the powerful bureaucracy, which can do everything but change.

Having pushed their trade dispute to the point of mutual disadvantage, the United States and Japan are moved bravely ahead toward the status quo ante -- toward the policy positions of the Bush era that Candidate Clinton so willingly assailed and President Clinton so coyly embraces.Make no mistake: Japan is the clear winner in this test of wills, which is not to say that its weak governments have enhanced the well-being of their people. Quite the reverse. If the Clinton administration is to execute this latest flip-flop without excessive embarrassment, it had better hope Japanese business prevails over Tokyo's bureaucracy.

''Base, indeed, is the double-standard policy of the U.S. o the nuclear issue which is raising a hue and cry over the non-existent 'nuclear problem' of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea while feigning ignorance of Japan's move to become a nuclear power.''London -- So reports the North Korean official press agency. Hyperbole aside, there is, sad to say, a kernel of truth in what Pyongyang says. Why are the Japanese building up huge stocks of bomb-grade plutonium? And -- this is the question of the month -- why are the British helping them?

Japan's Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa has been sufficiently weakened by political battles he barely survived to make his Friday meeting with President Clinton a probable waste of time. His political and economic reforms riddled by compromise, he hardly seems strong enough to make Japan's interest groups accept numerical goals to measure progress in opening markets to foreign competition.That is the key remaining U.S. demand on Japanese economic restructuring. Mr. Hosokawa's economic stimulus package, just enacted, goes about as far as American firms can expect in boosting Japanese demand for their products and services.

For its next prime minister, its first in four decades outside the corrupting embrace of the Liberal Democratic Party, Japan is likely to get a modernist who comes out of a ruling family, a reformer who started out in politics with the LDP, a southern governor (sound familiar?) with contempt for the Tokyo establishment, a 55-year-old member of the post-war generation whose maternal grandfather, Fumimaro Konoe, was his nation's last civilian prime minister before Pearl Harbor.How long Morihiro Hosokawa can hold his disparate coalition of seven smallish parties together is a matter of intense speculation.

Japan is coming to grips with one of its demons. Police have investigated the March 20 fatal gassing in the Tokyo subway with exhaustive patience. Along the way they left a strong impression that Aum Shinri Kyo, which grew from a harmless herb business into a doomsday survivalist cult, is a formidable enemy of society. The world can join the Japanese in relief that, after rounding up 200 followers capable of taking reprisals, the police allowed themselves to capture the leader while he meditated within a compound they occupied.

HOW MUCH has Japan's economy shrunk since its bubble burst? It's a trick question; Japan's economy hasn't shrunk. It had only two down years over the past decade, and on average it grew 1 percent per year. Yet Japan is a depressed economy. Because growth has been so slow, a gap has opened up between what the economy could produce and what it actually produces. This "output gap" translates into rising unemployment and accelerating deflation. Slow growth can be almost as big a problem as actual output decline.

TOKYO -- The gilded-dressers affair can't hold a candle to Fergie's financial adviser or Diana's rival, but it has made for five of the juiciest days watchers of Japan's straight-laced royal family can remember.At issue are two ornate Japanese-style dressers and an armoire, made of paulownia wood and encrusted with 1,500 square patches of gold leaf in three layers.They first broke into public consciousness last Friday, when Yasuyuki Tatsumi, a furniture factory president from Kanazawa, some 200 miles west of Tokyo, proudly displayed them on national television.

Japan, after its latest financial scandals, had better recognize that it has grown too big and too intertwined with the world economy to operate in isolation. It is folly to expect a prospering society based on cozy networking among its powerful interest groups to turn itself, willy-nilly, into something Westernized, open and free of xenophobia. After all, its present system has brought dazzling prosperity. But Japan, for its part, should realize that its major partners can tolerate only so much deviation from accepted norms of commerce, corporate practice and business ethics.

The election for the lower house of parliament tomorrow is the most decisive in Japan since 1955, when the Liberal Democratic Party began an unbroken 38 years of one-party government. Whether that era has ended, is perpetuated or is starting to crack will be decided.The LDP is intertwined not only with big business, the bureaucracy, gangsterism and corruption but also with Japan's unparalleled economic growth and personal economic security of the past 38 years. How to throw out the bath water while saving the baby is the Japanese voters' dilemma, and the parties have not made it easy.