Kaifu

TOKYO -- Japan's government agreed yesterday to scrap Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu's attempt to send soldiers to help the U.S.-led force confronting Iraq in the Persian Gulf.The decision, reported by several Japanese newspapers and broadcast stations that cited unnamed sources within the governing Liberal Democratic Party, coincided with an announcement in Baghdad that 79 of the 305 Japanese hostages now being held in Iraq would soon be released. There was no clear sign whether the two events were connected.

TOKYO -- Japanese Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu is expected to announce later today that he will not seek a second term, raising the question whether a political leader here can exercise power and leadership in the Western sense.Close associates of Mr. Kaifu, who has led the country for two years, said he will step down as leader of the majority Liberal Democratic Party at the end of this month. The majority party's leader is automatically prime minister.Mr. Kaifu's decision followed a stunning setback last Monday when leaders of his own party unceremoniously scuttled a plan to reform Japan's scandal-ridden political system.

TOKYO -- Japan will send six vessels to help clear mines from the Persian Gulf, the first overseas use of Japanese forces since World War II, Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu announced last night.Reached more than a month after the end of the gulf war, the decision will create the first tangible product of Japan's eight-month constitutional debate on how to add a "physical presence" to supplement its more than $13 billion in cash contributions to the coalition of nations that defeated Iraq and to countries affected by the war.Answering questions at a press conference, Mr. Kaifu struggled for the right balance -- between making the most, for Western consumption, of a modest and long-delayed physical contribution to security in the region that supplies most of Japan's oil and making the least, for domestic political consumption, of any change in Japan's 45 years of postwar pacifism.

When modernizers seized power in Japan in 1868 and "restored" the Meiji emperor, they revitalized an ancient belief that he was divine. Veneration distracted from rapid change and westernization of Japan. The Showa emperor, Hirohito, was useful to the militarists who attacked Pearl Harbor, to the Americans who occupied Japan afterward and, until his death early last year, to the political-commercial oligarchy that has directed Japanese affairs since.Now his son, Akihito, has ascended the throne of the oldest continuous monarchy while an uncertain political leadership tries to decide what direction the prosperous country he personifies will take.

AMERICAN ''Japan Bashers,'' supposing Tokyo to be more vulnerable to Iraqi domination of OPEC than Washington, are demanding angrily that Japan should contribute many, many billions of dollars to cover a far greater share of the financial and military burdens bravely borne by Washington. Many bashers say that if a greedy Japan continues to be a free-riding beneficiary of the risk-taking sacrifices of others we should revoke our Alliance and impose prohibitive trade barriers.Meanwhile, careful Japanese analysts tell us privately -- we also read of it in the Times -- that the Liberal Democratic Party leadership incredulously digests this most recent Gulf-related cacophony of lamentation, self-pity and savage abuse of Japan voiced by Americans blind to Japan's present strategic benevolences.

TOKYO -- President Bush's oft-delayed first state visit here will meet up with something new in Japan-U.S. relations next month.For the first time in recent memory, Japan will have a prime minister who speaks his mind plainly and can do it in elegant English.The governing Liberal Democratic Party will assure that today when it crowns Kiichi Miyazawa's five decades in government by electing him its president, and thus prime minister-designate."The Americans are going to know just where they stand, which they've always said they wanted, but they're not always going to like it," said a foreigner who has been on the other side from Mr. Miyazawa in negotiations.

TOKYO -- Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu and President Mikhail S. Gorbachev gave top priority to their countries' toughest territorial dispute yesterday in the opening sessions of the Soviet leader's historic summit visit.The two leaders sealed the lips of all in the room, then tried for an hour and a half -- about half of their first meeting -- to find a last-minute way out of the dispute that has for four decades confounded all attempts to draft a peace treaty legally ending the two Sea of Japan neighbors' World War II state of belligerence.

TOKYO -- Japan's new prime minister lost no time yesterday in loading his Cabinet with scandal-tainted but powerful political warhorses his predecessor had disqualified from office.Including Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa himself, the new Cabinet and the new top ranks of the governing party contain five men stained by the Recruit Cosmos stocks-for-favors scandal of 1988, one convicted of accepting a bribe in the Lockheed scandal of the 1970s and one who resigned from a Cabinet two years ago in a sex scandal.

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.

Tokyo.--August 9, 1989, is a date Toshiki Kaifu and Takako Doi will remember all their lives.Mr. Kaifu, abruptly raised only a few days earlier from obscurity in the middle ranks of the governing Liberal Democratic Party's smallest major faction, became prime minister of Japan.Miss Doi, head of the Socialists, the country's biggest opposition party, became both the first woman and the first opposition member ever chosen for prime minister by either house of the Diet, Japan's parliament.On television and in the next day's papers, it was Miss Doi's personality and the novelty of her symbolic achievement that dominated.