IT IS, ON ONE LEVEL, NOTHING MORE than state-of-the-art lobbying, the type of thing the K Street crowd does in Washington, D.C., every day: create a “grass roots” campaign and run it from the top, with every jot and tittle taken care of form letters to congressmen; a toll-free 800 number in case people aye inclined to call their representatives directly rather than write; even banal advice on what to do if a personal visit to a congressman’s office is arranged (“be on time, dress appropriately, and make sure that you are friendly and cordial…”).
But this “grass roots” campaign comes with a twist: its “roots” are in Japan, in the offices of the Japan Auto Parts Industry Association (JAPIA), and its goal is to get members of the U.S. Congress with Japanese-owned plants in their districts to oppose the Clinton administration’s aggressive trade agenda with Tokyo. Late last year, in the midst of the increasingly acrimonious talks on Japan’s low level of auto and autoparts imports, the Japanese trade association–with an assist from the high-powered Washington political-consulting firm Robinson Lake/Sawyer Miller–began urging American employees at their “transplant” operations in the United States to protest the Clinton administration’s trade strategy. The elaborate campaign–material went out to each of Japan’s 180 auto-parts companies now operating in the United States–marks a new tack in Japanese efforts to influence American public opinion. In the past, major Japanese companies have typically hired former high-ranking U.S. government officials to flog their interests in Washington. That drew considerable flak from U.S. critics in the early 1990s, and Japanese firms have since quietly struggled to find new ways to make their views heard in Washington. Thus the new JAPIA effort.
Their concern is straightforward enough: that the administration’s push for increased sales from U.S. suppliers will further hurt an industry that is already in the midst of its worst postwar slump. “If an agreement including such numerical targets is made,” wrote JAPIA managing director Akio Suzuki to U.S. managers recently, “the effects would be unimaginable.”
There is, to be sure, nothing illegal or even particularly pernicious about the JAPIA campaign. But it is a vivid illustration of how Japanese industry tries to bend America’s traditional political and economic transparency to its own ends, even as Japan’s bureaucrats at home relentlessly defend their interests against foreign rivals. The campaign also stands in stark contrast to anything an American firm would ever try to do in Tokyo, given political and economic traditions in Japan that are anything but transparent.
The Japanese lobbying campaign, as outlined in scores of documents obtained recently by NEWSWEEK, aims to get American workers to complain about the alleged unfairness Of a Clinton administration trade agenda that could, conceivably, discriminate against them solely because they work for companies based in Japan. “The only thing foreign to us is why someone would want to take away our jobs,” reads one of the form letters JAPIA and Robinson Lake had drawn up for its members to send. For the most part the effort is fairly sophisticated, but on occasion it strikes painfully naive notes–you can, for example, practically hear the sound of Robinson Lake’s cash register ringing when JAPIA’s Suzuki writes to his U.S. membership that “we are starting a grass roots campaign, which are said to be very useful in this kind of situation.”
Perhaps. The less-than-subtle aspects of the “grass roots” campaign seem to have turned off as many American employees as they have inspired. While Laurence T. Greene, the executive vice president of procurement and government affairs at Diaamond-Star Motors in Normal, Ill.–a subsidiary of Mitsubishi Motors–wrote his congressman urging him to pursue “some very basic principles of American fair play,” the American director of another large Japanese auto-parts company concedes that he threw the whole package out “as soon as we got it.” Why? “Look, we’re in the Midwest, the heart of the U.S. [auto and autoparts] industry. Do you know how it would look for me to ask my workers to lobby their congressman on this, particularly because they know this is being run from Tokyo? They’re not stupid, and neither am I.”
Nor, despite the highpriced campaign, is it necessarily clear that Japanese auto-parts companies in America would be hurt by the administration’s efforts. The Japanese firms say they are spooked by language in the framework agreement–proposed last fall–that calls for “special consideration” to be given to U.S.-owned firms, rather than transplants. That, says Robinson Lake senior vice president Michael Lake, simply “pits one American worker against another.”
But U.S. trade negotiators insist they are not asking for Japanese automakers to discriminate against their traditional suppliers even if they have factories now in America–and senior Japanese trade negotiators say they now believe their American counterparts. With autos and auto parts accounting for 75 percent of the bilateral trade imbalance, the United States says it just wants Japanese companies to buy more in America, period–something the stronger yen is already prompting them to do anyway, if true, one confused American worker at a longtime Toyota supplier said last week, “maybe we should be lobbying for the framework, not against it.”
